The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye

In this gentle story set in the city of Muscat in Oman, young Aref is preparing to leave for the United States with his mother. He doesn't want to leave his country, his city and his friends and resists packing his suitcase. To help accept moving away, his mother enlists the help of Aref's grandfather, Sidi.

The story opens with Aref and his mother accompanying his father as he waits to go through customs at the airport in Muscat. His father is travelling on ahead of them to Ann Arbor, Michigan where his parents plan to stay for three years to study. He will have to travel to Kuwait, Frankfurt, New York and then finally on to Ann Arbor, Michigan. It will be a fifteen hour journey! They will follow in a week's time, after his father has settled into their apartment. Aref's parents are professors at the university in Muscat.

When they return home, Aref continues to complain to him mother about moving to America. He worries he won't be able to play soccer there, that he won't have any friends. But his mother assures him that he will make new friends there and to view the next three years as a great adventure. She also reminds Aref, that unlike millions of refugees, he will be able to return to his home country of Oman, in three years time.

Aref and his parents live in a two-storey home in a very modern neighbourhood.Despite these assurances Aref is certain he will miss his school in Oman, despite his new school in Michigan having a space camp and International Night where students from different countries share their culture and food. His best friend, Diram, gives Aref a T-shirt with their photos on it, asking him not to forget him. Another friend, Sulima also arrives with a gift. Sulima had lived in the United States when she was younger and she also reassures Aref, reminding him that the zoos, roller coasters, trains and skating rinks are lots of fun.

Aref knows he will miss his family's house, and with his uncle's family moving into their home, he doesn't want his cousins, Hani and Shadi using his room. He tells his mother he doesn't like sharing. And he certainly will miss his grandfather, Sidi.

Recognizing Aref just might need some help from his grandfather, Aref's mother calls him to come visit. Aref and his grandfather had made many plans to do different things over the years such as go to Masirah Island and watch the kite surfing, or march around Al-Hazem Fort. But with Aref leaving in a week what will happen?

Aref is so reluctant to pack his suitcase that he even wonders if he doesn't pack maybe he won't have to go to the United States. He isn't even excited about the airplane either. But then Sidi arrives in his "clackety green jeep" that he calls Monsieur". When Sidi asks Aref how packing is going, Aref tells him he can't fit any good things like his friends, his schooll, the Mutrah Souq or the sea turtle beach into it. When Aref continues to struggle and is very unhappy, his mother arranges for Sidi to take him overnight.

Sidi decides to take Aref on a series of trips exploring some places they haven't been before. At each site, Aref learns something that helps him come to accept his move to America and to finally pack his suitcase.

Discussion

The Turtle of Oman is a short, middle school novel that explores the themes of dealing with change, moving to a new country, what it might be like to move to a strange, new country, and the grandfather-grandson relationship.

Young Aref doesn't want to leave his beautiful home in his beloved country of Oman. He worries he will miss so many things and that he will forget his country. He wonders at the beginning of the novel,
"What if he forgot everything he had already learned, by leaving? Three years of being gone were not short. Not short at all. Anything could happen."

It is Aref's grandfather, Sidi who helps him come to terms with having to move to America for three years. Aref doesn't want to go; he doesn't want to leave his home, his friends, his school and all the good things that his beautiful country of Oman has to offer. But as he travels with Sidi to various favourite places, Aref begins to see his move differently.

Sidi gives Aref a stone as a memento at each place they visit: for example, a flatstone which he draws a smile on and the brown stone with grey speckles from the first beach they visit, the strange orange speckled stone from a meteorite. He tells Aref to use the stones to help him think of the different places they have visited.

At the Night of A Thousand Stars camp, Aref discovers the possibility of hope. His grandfather tells Aref that they will be connected, that if necessary he will take a computer class at the library to learn how to use email. By staying connected, Aref will know what is going on in Muscat. He won't forget his home. Sidi has Aref run around the camp while he sits in a chair and watches. No matter where Aref runs, Sidi can still see him, allowing Aref to realize that distance will not separate them.

At the camp. Aref and Sidi unexpectedly encounter a falconer named Jamal the falconer and his falcon, Fil-Fil. When Aref is allowed to have the falcon sit on his arm and then launch him into the air, he admires the bird's freedom and his ability to return back to the falconer. This is a reminder to Aref, that his trip is a sign of freedom to explore more of the world by going to Michigan, and that he will eventually be returning home.

At the turtle beach, Aref and Sidi talk about the wonder of the turtles who must navigate many hazards to return to nest each year. Sidi tells Aref, "I know...It's one of the wonders of the world...They must have imprints inside their cells - turtle directions. No one has to tell them. It pulls them right in. And it pulls all of them back and back to the same beach for years." Aref realizes that  like the turtles, he has something inside him too, that will always draw him back home, that will lead him back to Muscat, Oman.

His travels with Sidi reassure Aref that he will not forget  his home country of Oman, that he will be free to return and that like the turtles, he has those memories written inside him. Sidi, by encouraging Aref during their travels, to pause and remember specific scenes, is also helping him to create those memories that will remain with him forever.

Aref's upcoming journey to America also forces him to re-evaluate how he thought about his fellow students from other countries at his school. His school has students from Denmark, Thailand, Mexico, Iraq, the United States, India and Scotland. Yet he's never wondered how they felt being in a strange country or if they were homesick. His own fear of leaving make him wonder why he never considered asking them. Later on in the novel, he experiences the same emotions and fears that his fellow international students might have experienced when he asks Sidi, "...what if I don't make any friends in the United States...I will be the new one now. I won't know the same things they know. What if no one likes me?..."

The Turtle of Oman is a sweet, gentle story about a young boy coming to terms with a big change in his life. It offers a perspective that young students in the United States and Canada can explore, as they encounter newcomers to their own countries. A second novel, The Turtles of Michigan was recently published.

Book Details:

The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye
New York: Greenwillow Books     2014
313 pp.

Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar

"Once upon a time, there was a tree, living on the shores of a green-glass lake, breathing in hot desert air. Its black branches grew green leaves and snowy flowers, and bees lived in the blossoms. The tree was a gift, protecting the people in the village from injury, aging, disease. Death."

Hour of the Bees is an enchanting tale about several generations of a Mexican-American family with a connection to a magical past, and their struggle to hold fast to their roots.

The novel opens with twelve-year-old Carolina and her family enroute to her grandfather's ranch. Carolina dreads spending the next two months - her entire summer vacation - on her Grandpa Serge's two hundred acre sheep ranch in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Carolina's grandfather has dementia so her father (Raul) and her mother (Patricia) plan on moving him into The Seville, an assisted-living facility in Albuquerque and selling the ranch. Their number one goal this summer is "not to upset Grandpa".

The ranch contains an old barn, a farmhouse that is run down and a dozen boney sheep wandering in a browned pasture. Carolina notes that "there's a black scabby tree stump on the edge of the pasture". Carolina's grandfather, Serge has a thin green oxygen tubes running into his nose, watery blue eyes and pale skin. After Carolina and her one-year-old brother Luis (Lu) are introduced, she stays on the porch to watch Lu and her grandfather. Serge tells her that there has been no rain at the ranch for a hundred years, "and no rain for a hundred years means no bees." He explains that no rain means no flowers and therefore no bees. But Carolina is certain she has seen at least two bees when they arrived.

Carolina's father attempts to convince Serge that they need to move him into a home and sell the ranch to pay for his care at The Seville. This doesn't go over very well with Serge whose relationship with Raul is strained. Raul left home twelve years ago and never returned. Now with the impending sale of the ranch, Serge feels that his son Raul is turning his back on his heritage. Over the next few weeks, Carolina and her family begin cleaning Serge's home and packing up his belongings.

Curious about her grandparents including her deceased grandmother, Carolina questions her father about his parents and his relationship with them. He tells her that Grandma Rosa was stubborn, fiery and adventurous, loving to travel. She died of cancer twelve years ago on Raul's birthday. But he refuses to talk about why he doesn't get along with Serge.

Unlike her father and mother and her older sister Alta, Carolina seems drawn to her grandfather. When she can't sleep one night, after spending time helping her father in the sheep pasture, she sits on the porch with Serge. He tells her there used to be a lake just beyond the ridge near the house. While Carolina believes this is Serge simply exhibiting more "word salad" - random words due to his dementia, Serge insists on telling her a story.

The story is about a boy named Serge and a girl named Rosa who lived in a village. The village was founded in 1480 by a group of Spaniards, in search of gold. Instead of gold they found an oasis, a "green-glass lake" and a huge tree.  The tree was unlike anything ever seen before, having black bark and emerald green leaves. It bloomed all year long, with beautiful, fragrant white blossoms that gave off a "honey-vanilla fragrance". The tree, Father Alejandro told everyone, was a gift. "Bees made colonies in the branches, and like good tenants, they kept the blossoms tidy...The bees kept the whole tree alive." 

Father Alejandro, who accompanied the exploration party, founded the village and built the mission.  They built homes of stone and red desert clay and married the local women, keeping sheep and goats. "Their children and grandchildren built huts of their own on the lakeshore. No one ever left. No one ever died. Those sailors grew old, yes, enough to be called elders of the village., but their aging was slow. They were cheating time."

People were born and aged slowly. Infancy took decades, people grew up and stayed. Whenever someone was hurt, the injury simply healed. In the story Serge tells Carolina, the boy named Serge watched one day as a cut to the bone on his friend Rosa's leg heals instantly. Father Alejandro explained that in the outside world people suffered pain and even death from wounds. But within the village, the gift of the tree made pain and aging impossible. For the young Serge this was a puzzling notion. Nevertheless Serge loved the village and the beautiful tree and he fell in love with Rosa who always seemed so full of life and who always had a cloud of bees trailing behind her.

However, Rosa was restless. Whenever Father Alejandro spoke about his travels, Rosa glowed with excitement. While Serge was content to stay in the village, Rosa was determined to leave it. She seemed to have an insatiable wunderlust."I've had enough of this lake, these stars, this tree,...We've seen everything there is to see here." Serge understood Father's stories, "that the world was the empty clam shell and the tree, the pearl. Nothing outside the village would ever compare with what they had."

Eventually Serge and Rosa married and as a wedding gift, Serge promised to travel with Rosa. But when the time came for them to leave Serge kept postponing their departure until eventually Rosa packed a bag and decided to leave. To keep her safe, Serge made Rosa a bracelet containing the bark of the black tree. Rosa left and did not return for years. But when she did she revealed to Serge the bark from the tree protected her from harm. And this leads Rosa to a decision that changes the course of the village forever.

As the weeks of the summer pass with Carolina spending time with her grandfather and listening to his  story, she finds herself drawn to him. "If it was anyone else, I'd be bored to tears, but when Serge talks, it feels like the only sound. My ears are magnets for his words."  She also begins to understand his connection to the ranch and the land.  Perhaps Serge's story is not just a story after all but the key to Carolina and her family's past and their future. Will they be like Rosa and throw it away or like Serge and remain faithful?

Discussion

In Hour of the Bees, Eagar makes use of the literary device known as a story within a story. In the novel the outer or framing story is about Carolina and her family packing up her grandfather's ranch and helping him make the transition to an assisted living facility in Albuquerque. He has dementia so his random statements about the drought and the lack of bees seem like a symptom of his illness mixed in with his confusion about where he is. There also appears to be a strained relationship between Grandpa Serge and Carolina's father who left the ranch twelve years ago. Grandpa Serge feels that his son has "spit on his roots" and he advises Carolina not to do the same.

Within this story is the second story, a remarkable story about a village where no one ever dies. This gift is tied to a huge black tree with emerald leaves, its roots touching a "green-glass lake". As a result, no one ever leaves the village nor has the desire to leave. That is until Rosa,  who is determined to some day find a way to leave. Her leaving brings about a catastrophe of immense proportions upon the village and its inhabitants who, filled with a desire to see the world, also leave.Their abandoning of their heritage and their gift leads to their demise. The reader is never sure until the very end whether the story is based in reality or part of an old man's imagination and dementia.

Carolina is eager to hear more of the story throughout the summer months, as her bond with her Grandpa Serge grows. Serge is determined to share with her the meaning of the story. He tells her to imagine the beautiful black tree and states, "No matter how far away you are when you bloom, you are always tied to your roots...Your roots are part of you, Caro-leen-a. You must never spit on them."  Serge's story causes Carolina to begin to question her parents decision to sell the family ranch.  Serge tells her, "Some people are afraid of the future. Your father is terrified of the past."

As Carolina hears more of the story she becomes convinced that the story Serge is telling her  is a story about what really happened to the village, the ranch and how the hundred-year drought came about. It is a story about her family's heritage and she's desperate to hear the end of it. From the very beginning of the novel there are hints that the story might actually be based in reality. The reader follows Carolina as she makes discoveries on the ranch that are part of Serge's story. She notes that "there's a scabby black tree stump on the edge of the pasture" and in a foreshadowing of an event in the story, wonders "Whose bright idea was it to chop it down and get rid of the only shade for miles and miles?"  While cleaning out Serge's closet, Carolina and Alta discover all the treasures that Rosa accumulated from her travels. When she questions her father about the items he tells her that only Rosa travelled, just as in Serge's story.  In amongst the treasures, Carolina finds the bark bracelet Serge made for Rosa before she left the village, "Black bard strung onto a leather bracelet... The bark swirls, grains trickling into formation, a cellular wooden waterfall frozen in time. It feels like staring at eternity, looking at this bracelet." It is the one item Carolina chooses from the closet as a keepsake. Carolina also finds an unusual black seed which she decides to plant. Later on she wonders about Serge's story because "So much of his story is stolen from real life." She wonders if Serge was always such a masterful storyteller and if he believes the stories he's telling her.  As Carolina eventually discovers, Serge's story is all too real.

Her time at the ranch changes Carolina's perspective on many things including how she values her Mexican heritage, how her family lives and even how she views the elderly.As a result of her grandfather's story, Carolina is challenged to reconsider how she has rejected in a simple but significant way her Mexican heritage. For example she and her friends have changed their names to hide their Spanish origin but Grandpa Serge urges her to use her full name. "Caro-leen-a...is a beautiful, strong, Spanish name."  Carolina who goes by Carol considers, "My friends Gabby and Sofie are really Gabriela and Sofia, but we don't call them that, not since Manuela Rodriguez...started going by Manny."  Later on when Mr. Gonzalez the real estate agent comes to the ranch, Carolina finds herself telling her mother that her father should care about his history, his family, and his roots. "I'm surprised, too - this sounds nothing like me. Caring about my roots? Worrying about what will happen to this ranch, this land?" By the end of the summer when they do leave the ranch Carolina is distraught that her family is giving up the ranch. The city, once comfortingly familiar now feels strange. "It's loud. Not just the traffic, but the city itself. A million people talking at the same time, no one listening. A million televisions on full blast, no one watching. The humming and buzzing of the bees has been replaced with the sound of electricity...It's deafening." Carolina feels "There's no air in the city." The air is "not real air, not like out in the desert." Her "street is a row of birdhouse, all of us boxed into our own yards by identical picket fences."  Carolina begins to wish she lived in the desert.

Her perspective on her grandfather changes too. At the beginning of the novel she sees her grandfather as "a rusty old man parked on the porch like a leaky, broken-down car." When her sister Alta states that Serge is "like the Crypt Keeper" with "Old-man eyes", Carolina notices "But there's something alive behind them. Like he has X-ray vision to your thoughts." As she goes to help her grandfather with the sheep, Carolina admits that she feels differently about him. "When my parents told me we'd be spending the summer here, I expected to have stiff, forced conversations with this grandfather I'd never met. I expected he'd ask me about school, about my friends, about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't think  he's have anything interesting to say. I didn't think he'd spin a magical story about a tree and a lake and a girl..." Carolina's inward change is mirrored by and outward change too. When she sees herself in the mirror while trying on her new clothing for the upcoming school year, she asks "Who is this girl?"  Her hair "notoriously frizzy but usually tamed by a straightening iron, is a ball of tangled black yarn" and her skin "is leathery with tan", her eyes "sunken into my face with exhaustion, are dull and black". She describes her look as "feral, wild."

By the time Carolina leaves the family ranch she finds herself worrying about "Things like a lonely grandfather who still has a story to finish." When she goes to the Seville with her family, Carolina is shocked at the changes in her grandfather. She recognizes only his blue eyes, and instead sees a person "bloated like a fish with infected gills, chalk-faced, drooling." He is sedated to calm him and unable to talk at all. She is shocked that Serge is locked into the Seville unable to leave for a walk and she fights to see him, for her family to make time in their busy lives for him.

Eagar ties up all the loose ends to craft a touching conclusion to this novel, where Raul is reconciled with both his father and his heritage, where Carolina begins to take pride in her roots and where Alta, black sheep of the family who doesn't share Carolina's roots with Serge, is invited to be a part of their family.  Ironically it is when Carolina begins to accept her family's past and plants the strange black seed that the rejuvenating rains return.

The only drawback to this novel, is the unimaginative, bland cover discouraging young readers from ever cracking the cover. Eagar has crafted a lovely story that deserves a beautiful cover and there certainly was enough material in the story to design something that would draw readers in. What a shame.This is a lovely, unique novel for young readers looking for something very different to read.

Book Details:

Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar
Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press     2016
360 pp.

The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm

The Fourteenth Goldfish is a
humorous look at one family's life when a scientific impossibility becomes a reality.

Eleven-year-old Ellie Cruz lives with her mother, a high school drama teacher, in a small, two bedroom house in the Bay Area surrounding San Francisco. One afternoon Ellie's babysitter, Nicole tells her that her mom will be late coming home because she has to pick Ellie's grandfather up from the police station.Ellie can't imagine what her grandfather has gotten into. He's a scientist who's never approved of Ellie's mom's love of theatre, so Ellie knows this will interesting.

When Ellie's mom returns home she is accompanied by a slender, teenage boy with long hair. At first Ellie thinks he might be one of the kids from her mother's theatre crew. As her mother and the boy argue back and forth, Ellie begins to realize that he seems familiar. When she spies the college ring on the boy's finger she realizes the boy is her grandpa.

Her grandfather tells Ellie that he has found a way to reverse aging, through cellular regeneration. He's discovered the fountain of youth. Ellie is filled with disbelief but her mother assures her that the thirteen-year-old boy standing before them is actually her seventy-seven-year-old grandfather, Melvin Herbert Sagarsky.

As Melvin stuffs himself with pizza, he tells Ellie that his vision and hearing has returned and his arthritis is gone. He also says he was picked up by the police for trespassing on private property - the lab where he once worked and whose reputation he helped build.

The next morning Melvin tells Ellie that he needs to get into his lab to recover his jellyfish specimen. He explains to Ellie that he has a species of jellyfish, Turritopsis melvinus in the lab. The T. melvinus is what helped him to "sort out the mechanism for reversing senescence" or the process of aging. Ellie is skeptical but Melvin explains to her that there are plenty of examples in nature of organisms with regenerative abilities. A few months ago, Melvin states that he was contacted by an Australian diver who had found an odd specimen of T. nutricula. When Melvin received the specimen he was certain it was a new species as it was huge and had other differences. So he named it Turritopsis melvinus. He then created a compound which he tested on adult mice who reverted to adolescence. He decided to test it on himself and he too reverted to adolescence. But the jellyfish is still in the lab and Melvin wants it to continue his research.

First though Melvin is sent to school with Ellie. Besides dressing very eccentrically, Melvin loves the large school lunches. As he struggles to fit in at school, Melvin schemes to retrieve his jellyfish from his old lab, in the hopes that he can publish his work and win a coveted Nobel Prize. But as Ellie learns more about the world of science and what it means to be a scientist she begins to wonder at the price some pay for the knowledge they gain and whether every discovery is necessarily good. It is Ellie who forces Melvin to consider the true cost of his discovery.

Discussion

Jennifer Holm has written an engaging, humorous story for younger readers that explores both the importance of science in our lives but also the ethical dilemmas scientists should consider but sometimes do not,  in the face of new discoveries. Holm's writing draws from her personal experience growing up with a father who was a pediatrician and who regularly kept "petri dishes with blood agar in our refrigerator to grow bacteria cultures."

In The Fourteenth Goldfish, Ellie's grandfather Melvin Sagarsky is determined to sneak into his old lab and obtain his jellyfish, T. melvinus, from which he created a compound that reversed aging and turned him from an old man into an adolescent. Melvin shows up at Ellie's house being the snarky, quirky grandfather she's always known except that he's now in the body of a thirteen year old boy. He's determined to recover T. melvinus, continue his research and win the coveted Nobel Prize.

As Ellie spends time with her grandfather, he explains the positive character traits of scientists and why science is so important - that it has brought about good change in the world.  Her grandfather mentions many famous scientists such as Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer and Galileo and presents to his granddaughter what he believes are characteristics that make scientists superior to other people in society. He tells her that scientists are persistent. "Average people just give up at the obstacles we face every day. Scientists fail again and again and again. Sometimes for our whole lives. But we don't give up, because we want solve the puzzle." According to Melvin, scientists "keep trying because they believe in the possible...That it's possible to cure polio. That it's possible to sequence the human genome. That it's possible to find a way to reverse aging. That science can change the world."

Ellie researches the scientists her grandfather has mentioned so she can write about one of them for a school project. While researching Oppenheimer, Ellie discovers that the scientists working on the first atomic bomb had mixed feelings about their success. Oppenheimer stated  "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent." Ellie understands a little how they felt because her feelings were the same when her "grandfather walked through the front door looking like a teenager." 

Even though they fail at their first attempt to gain access to the lab, Ellie's grandfather remains undeterred, telling Ellie that "Scientists fail all the time...you have to keep at it. Just like Marie Curie" who eventually won a Nobel prize. Once they do rescue the jellyfish specimen from his old lab, her grandfather begins making plans to set up a lab and continue his work. However, Ellie begins to have reservations about his research. Her research into some of the scientists her grandfather mentioned shows that science can also have a dark side too. "Marie Curie was exposed to a lot of radiation during her experiments. Eventually it poisoned her. Her discovery killed her." When her best friend Brianna tells Ellie that she thinks Melvin is cute, Ellie is stunned that her friend likes her seventy-seven year-old grandfather. 

Melvin teaches Ellie to observe the world around her, to ask questions and to think more deeply about things. This has an unexpected result because Ellie begins to seriously consider the consequences of her grandfather's discovery with the critical observation of a scientist.  "I look around my room with new eyes, and what I observe makes me question everything. The handprints on the wall: as people grow older, will hands get smaller instead of bigger because of T. melvinus?...will people have fewer candles on their cake every year because they're getting younger?"  Ellie already knows the other side of the Marie Curie story, but what about Robert Oppenheimer?  Her internet searches reveal that almost two hundred thousand people died because of the atomic bomb. Was the development of the bomb good?

This leads her to question her grandfather about what his discovery will mean for the world: will they have changed it for the better? When Ellie's grandfather clings to the idea that science is always for the good, she counters, "I believe in science! But what if it isn't a good idea? What if we're not Salk? What if we're Oppenheimer? What if T. melvinus is like the bomb?"

Ellie asks her grandfather, "Is growing up, growing old - life - is it all so terrible?" Ellie goes full circle remembering what her grandfather said to her about scientists believing in "the possible".  She tells her grandfather that she wants that possibility of living her life from the age of twelve until she's old. Ellie's idea is further affirmed when she attends her mother's high school production of Our Town, a Thornton Wilder play about life in small town America. The play's central theme is that the living do not appreciate life while they are living it and take the time to savour it fully. This is expressed by the character of Emily who grows up, marries but dies unexpectedly after having her second child. She returns to the living for one day, her twelfth birthday.
"She has a line about whether anyone understands life when they're living it. I get what she's trying to say: life is precious and we don't realize that at the time. But maybe life's also precious because it doesn't last forever. Like an amusement park ride. The roller coaster is exciting the first time. But would it be as fun if you did it again and again and again?" Ultimately, Melvin Herbert Sagarsky gets it and this understanding is shown in what he tells Ellie and what choices he makes.

The Fourteenth Goldfish is a thoughtful novel in which author Jennifer Holm asks her young readers to consider the consequences of scientific discoveries and to ask hard questions. Questions like,  "Should we do something just because we can?" and "How will the discovery of...change the world?"  In this novel it is the discovery of reversing aging but it could be anything - the genetic modification of foods or animals.

One of the strengths of The Fourteenth Goldfish is the strong, well developed characters Holm creates. She has captured the snarky, confident, proud nature of an accomplished, elderly scientist in the character of Melvin Sagarsky. He's a brilliant mix of elderly wit and teenage moodiness. Ellie Cruz is a thoughtful, intelligent young girl whose natural curiosity is sparked by her grandfather. Even the secondary characters are interesting; Raj who shows an interest in Melvin's research and Ben, Ellie's mother's boyfriend who desperately wants to marry her.

The Fourteenth Goldfish is a great novel for middle grade readers and is highly recommended. The title refers to the goldfish Ellie was given by her preschool teacher, Starlily to teach her about the cycle of life. After all her classmates goldfish had died, Ellie's fish seemed to live on and on until it died in fifth grade. But it turns out that Ellie's first goldfish actually died years ago and her mother had been replacing each goldfish with another until that fateful thirteenth in grade five. Melvin is the fourteenth goldfish - the one who lives on and on.

It should be noted that Madame Curie won TWO Nobel Prizes, one in Physics in 1903 and the other in Chemistry in 1911. To this day she remains the only person to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in TWO different sciences. Also poliomyelitis cannot be cured but it can be prevented through vaccination.

Book Details:

The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm
New York: Random House     2014
195 pp.