Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts! The First Experiment

by Dowell, Frances O'Roark; McDaniels, Preston

• ISBN13: 9781416901952
• ISBN10: 1416901957
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-06-01
• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Summary

Readers are invited to meet Phineas L. MacGuire: scientist, boy-genius, allergic to purple. This funny middle-grade novel comes complete with tantalizingly gruesome experiments, including one on how to blow up a volcano. Illustrations.

Author Biography

Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Award; Where I’d Like to Be; The Secret Language of Girls and its sequels The Kind of Friends We Used to Be and The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker, which received three starred reviews; Anybody Shining; Ten Miles Past Normal; Trouble the Water; the Sam the Man series; The Class; and most recently, How to Build a Story. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. Connect with Frances online at FrancesDowell.com.

Preston McDaniels is the illustrator of the Phineas L. MacGuire series and Cynthia Rylant’s Lighthouse Family series. He lives in Aurora, Nebraska, with his wife and two daughters.

Excerpts

chapter one

My name is Phineas Listerman MacGuire.

Most people call me Mac.

It's okay if you call me Phin.

You can even call me Phineas.

Forget about calling me Listerman.

I am allergic to fifteen things. My mom says this is not true, that I'm only allergic to two things, peanuts and cat hair. But I am a scientist, and she's not. I have scientific proof that it makes me itchy to think about the following items:

Avocados

Yogurt, any flavor

Cottage cheese

Grape jelly

Any kind of kissing,

especially when there's lipstick

Celery

Purple flowers

Purple Magic Markers

Purple crayons

Anything purple

Moist towelettes in foil packs

Telephone calls

All girls

I started fourth grade three weeks ago. When I started, I had a best friend. His name was Marcus Ballou. Marcus is also a scientist. We were a scientific team. We specialized in volcanoes, caves, fossils, all insects, and the solar system. But mostly volcanoes.

We have made and erupted over eighty-seven volcanoes in our lifetime. It's very simple. You take an empty soda bottle (big) and put it in a baking pan (also big). Fill the bottle with lots of baking soda and four or five squirts of dishwashing liquid.

Then add vinegar and stand back.

You should do it outside, in case you were wondering. Unless you have a less irritated mom than mine. Then maybe you could do it on the kitchen table. If you're like me and spill stuff everywhere even when you're trying really hard to be careful, you should definitely do it at a friend's house.

Here is the problem with Marcus: He moved. To Lawrence, Kansas. This is bad for at least two reasons. Now we aren't a scientific team anymore. Also, he waited until the second week of school to move. If he had moved before school started, then I would have known to look around for a new best friend on the first day.

But I didn't know to do this. I still had Marcus.

Everybody knew that me and Marcus were best friends and a scientific team. No one else tried to be best friends with us. They picked other best friends.

Here's what you would hear all the time:

"Mac and Marcus"

"Mac and Marcus"

"Mac and Marcus"

Now all you hear is:

"Mac"

"Mac"

"Mac"

Scientifically speaking, it's a pretty lonely sound.

Copyright © 2006 by Frances O¹Roark Dowell

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Excerpted from Phineas L. MacGuire ... Erupts!: The First Experiment by Frances O'Roark Dowell
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.