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Lilly lives in a house with a big, wild yard. Until Thursday, the 3rd of February, her biggest worry was her clumsiness and her devilishly strict school teacher. The most she ever thought about plants (moving or otherwise) was watching her dad mow the lawn… until Thursday the 3rd of February, when Zoey moved in next door.In this book for readers age 8-12, Lilly and her new friend discover that their homes have a wild history … a botanical one. They stumble onto seeds that explode into blossom in a (rather noisy) instant. They discover a vine that will do anything to get its tendrils on its favorite food – pizza. They fall into a spell-binding “killing tree” that almost spells the end of Lilly and her parents. Only through quick thinking and brave action is Lilly able to save them from being digested by the 20-foot singing bush. Lilly comes from a long line of talented Arcadian botanists. Her great grandmother was a world-famous botanist, revered by everyone from the school principal to Zoey’s crazy dead aunt. If that isn’t enough, Lilly’s great-grandfather, long thought dead, is still kicking, thanks to a rare berry with a powerful punch. With Zoey’s help, Lilly begins to find seeds of greatness inside herself as she is stretched to the limit to save her family and her friends – and to survive the school year.
When I was a kid, I loved the idea of magic. I loved that magic could be used by anyone, especially kids, to succeed in a difficult world. My favorite books were by Roald Dahl, the great author of James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, among others. They were brilliant, and I dreamed of becoming Matilda, or Charlie. I felt empowered by it. I was, I have to admit, disappointed when I got to the tough “tween” age and realized that not only were the wonderful worlds I’d read about not real, there wasn’t any possibility that they could be, because magic wasn’t, after all, real.
I accepted that difficult reality and grew up. Then, among the sandstone cliffs of Southern Utah I found magic … the science of the natural world. I was a National Park Service ranger at Zion National Park for three seasons after college. In the cool quiet nights of the canyon, when the stone breathed out the heat it had absorbed during the day, and the bats swirled and dove among the Cottonwood trees, I would sit for hours with my scientist friends and talk about the places they had hiked, what they had seen, and what we could learn. Insects that glow in the dark? A tree that has lived for 4000 years? A flower that has amazing antibacterial properties? I began to realize how little I knew of the world that had been emerging and growing and dying around me my whole life. Magic, I decided, was simply events that we couldn’t explain. And that is what research science is all about … studying the unexplainable.
So, that is where Lilly began.
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I’ve been working on a really fun children’s chapter book. The idea came a few years ago during a particularly inspiring college ecology course. There is so much to learn about the world, about nature. It is all around us, and yet the workings of … say, a dandelion … is as foreign to most of us as Madagascar. We know so little about how living things work, to us it seems like magic.
Botanists as heroes? Sounds unlikely, you say. But you would be glad to have a good botanist around if a carnivorous vine kept stealing your pizza. Or a man-eating plant was trying to hypnotize your dad.
Lee Aase of SMUG (Social Media University Global) has me be a guinea pig on one of his podcast classes. I gave Lee chapter three of the audio book the talented Toby Palmer has put together for me. Those of you who hear the audio book may want to know what chapter one and two are all about…..
Chapter 1 – From beneath the snow, daffodils pop from the ground. A fire-bush sizzles and steams under fat snowflakes. A blue vine wiggles through the drifts. Our heroine Lilly sleeps inside her house, unaware of the action. A cloaked stranger approaches the house, casts a gray powder over the yard, and all the plants fall still.
Chapter 2 – Lilly is running to school (late) when she notices that the iron gate of the vacant house next door is open. Lilly meets Zoey.
Chapter 3 – Lilly is really late for school – she sprints into her classroom and is berated by her devilishly-strict teacher, Mr. Widison. Mr. Widison’s father (The Elder) also teaches at the school. He is so old he has a hard time handling his dentures. The Elder bursts into the room to say that the hall is filled with flowers.
