Saved by the Smell

December 9, 2024
Middle schooler Ari’s mother—a scientist with a knack for finding often-catastrophic solutions to problems most other scientists (and nonscientists) don’t believe need solving—is unlike his classmates’ mothers. Few kids, for example, must dodge laser beams from their parents’ inventions. With laundry piling up, Ari’s mom, wearing her last clean lab coat and fielding comments from her ice cube–size supercomputer creation about Ari “having started smelling funky four days ago,” neither repairs the family’s washing machine nor heads to a laundromat. Instead, she invents a time portal to take the family back to when they last had fresh clothing. When mother, son, and pet turtle Fred are inadvertently transported to the Cretaceous Period and the time portal’s remote control is destroyed, the trio must run for their lives in a dinosaur-populated landscape—until a side effect of Ari’s odor proves an unexpected savior. Early readers will delight in Ari’s wild adventures with his quirky and loving mad scientist mom in this good-humored series kickoff by Lerner (the Nat the Cat series), punctuated by crisp, unadorned line drawings. Character skin tones match the hue of the page. Ages 5–8. Agent: Myrsini Stephanides, Arc Literary.