Frances O'Roark Dowell

You might be the most brilliant scientist in your elementary school, but cooking family dinner is a chemistry experiment you never signed up for. A pinch of this and a dash of that just does not seem very scientific. But you need to figure out recipes quickly, because there is a ten thousand dollar prize on the line for a major bake-off. To make your life even more complicated, the toughest bully in school has developed an obsession with your homemade brownies. If you cannot supply him with a fresh batch every morning, you are going to get clobbered. With the help of your best friends, you begin to realize that the kitchen is just another kind of laboratory. You will have to keep your cool and measure your ingredients perfectly to win the prize and keep the school bully happy at the same time.

To be the absolute best scientist in the entire fourth grade, you need to set your sights on something massive: outer space. You desperately want to go to Space Camp to simulate a real mission to Mars, but the camp is incredibly expensive and you have to earn the money yourself. Your brilliant plan is to become a dog walker, which pairs you up with a gigantic, hyperactive Yellow Lab named Lemon Drop. Surviving a walk with this massive dog is hard enough, but dealing with his endless amounts of drool is a whole different challenge. With the help of your best friends, you realize that Lemon Drop's messy slobber is actually the perfect ingredient for a brand-new, highly unusual science experiment. You will have to use all your genius logic to manage the dog, run the tests, and secure your ticket to the stars.

Your ultimate goal for the fourth grade is simple: you must be the greatest scientist to ever walk the halls. You are well on your way when your rival scientist friend begs you to help her earn a scout badge by cultivating the exact mold that produces penicillin. Being a brilliant expert on all things gross and slimy, you are thrilled to tackle the challenge. But your focus gets completely derailed when your best friend decides to run for class president and demands that you serve as his top campaign manager. If juggling politics and penicillin is not hard enough, you are suddenly stuck with a bizarre new babysitter who acts suspiciously like a teenage alien from the Planet Pink. When she accidentally throws away your prized dried worm collection, your scientific timeline is thrown into total chaos. You will have to use serious problem-solving skills to win the election, survive the alien babysitter, and master the mold.

You consider yourself the ultimate scientific genius of the fourth grade. You are an absolute expert on studying mold, and you can scientifically prove that you are allergic to girls, telephone calls, and the color purple. The one thing you absolutely do not have is a best friend. Unfortunately, your teacher just paired you up for the massive school science fair with the one kid you actively consider your un-best friend. To make matters a million times worse, this kid wants to base your entire project on dinosaurs, which is incredibly embarrassing and completely third-grade behavior. As you try to figure out how to survive the project without ruining your scientific reputation, you realize the rest of the school hates your new partner just as much as you do. Putting on your detective hat, you decide to investigate exactly why your un-best friend is so unpopular, all while trying to build the perfect erupting volcano.