Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Brian Biggs

Frank Einstein is a scientist and an inventor.  He's also a kid.  Frank is determined to win this year's Midville Science Prize.  With the winnings, he'll be able to save his grandfather's Fix It! repair shop.  With Frank's invention of two SmartBots, Klink and Klank, he tackles his biggest project of all: an antimatter motor.  But Frank, his friend Watson, and the two robots realizes they have bigger problems to worry about than the science fair: Frank's rival kid-scientist Edison has some evil ideas of his own.

I love the idea of these books.  A series that teaches scientific concepts!  So cool!  This first book looked at the concept of matter, the next book will look at energy, and so on it will go through six planned books.  Really great idea.  And I totally learned things.  For example, on the second page, I learned the correct way to calculate distance between seeing lightening and hearing thunder.  I always thought the number of seconds between them was the number of miles a way the storm was.  Wrong! You have to divide it by five, because there's five seconds between light and sound for every mile.  I've been doing it wrong my whole life.

As for the story itself, I wasn't blown away.  It was a fine lower-middle grade read.  It wasn't quite what I expect from Jon Scieszka, which is really sharp and funny.  I mean, it's quite the undertaking, explaining the entire concept of matter while also making a fun story!  Future books will probably be smoother.  I thought it was perhaps a little clunky, melding the adventure story with the science concepts.  

I liked that along with the story there are diagrams of the scientific concepts.  You can ignore them if you want, but they definitely helped a visual person like me better understand the concepts Frank was using in his inventions.  And aside from the diagrams there were very cute illustrations by Brain Biggs.

I look forward to seeing where the rest of the series goes.

Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor comes out August 19, 2014.

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks

The true stories of three scientists who changed the way we think about primates forever.  Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas were all recruited by anthropologist Louis Leakey and set out, with little to no training or background, on field research that would result in discoveries that advanced our understanding of the link between humans and primates.

Another triumph from First Second!  Seriously, can they do anything wrong?  I don't think I've read anything from First Second that I haven't loved.

This is a great middle grade graphic novel that does an excellent job at showing how each of the three women got her big break, the research she did, discoveries made, and also the toll this kind of work took on her personal life.

Jane Goodall was the first to be discovered by Louis Leakey.  Jane had always wanted to study animals, but for a while her work had nothing to do with animals.  She jumped at the chance to visit a school friend in Kenya, and there she met Louis Leaky, who was working in Nairobi.  She started out working as Leakey's secretary, but soon had the chance to study chimpanzees.  So off she went, with no schooling in anthropology or sciences, no advanced degree.  She named the chimpanzees, much to other scientist's disgust (scientists usually would number them), but when Jane observed chimps using tools and eating meat, she earned the respect of her peers.