Spotlight: The Atomic Weight Secrets by Eden Unger Bowditch

Description

In 1903, five truly brilliant young inventors, the children of the world's most important scientists, went about their lives and their work as they always had.
But all that changed the day the men in black arrived.
They arrived to take twelve-year-old Jasper Modest and his six-year-old sister, Lucy he with his remarkable creations and she with her perfect memory from their London, England home to a place across the ocean they'd never seen before.
They arrived to take nine-year-old Wallace Banneker, last in a long line of Africa-descended scientists, from his chemistry, his father, and his New York home to a life he d never imagined.
Twelve-year-old Noah Canto-Sagas, already missing his world-famous and beloved mother, was taken from Toronto, Canada, carrying only his clothes, his violin, and his remarkable mind.
And thirteen-year-old Faye Vigyanveta, the genius daughter of India's wealthiest and most accomplished scientists, was removed by force from her life of luxury.
From all across the world, they've been taken to mysterious Sole Manner Farm, and a beautiful but isolated schoolhouse in Dayton, Ohio, without a word from their parents as to why. Not even the wonderful schoolteacher they find there, Miss Brett, can explain it. She can give them love and care, but she can t give them answers.
Things only get stranger from there. What is the book with no pages Jasper and Lucy find in their mother's underwear drawer, and why do the men in black want it so badly?
How is it all the children have been taught the same bizarre poem and yet no other rhymes or stories their entire lives?
And why haven't their parents tried to contact them?
Whatever the reasons, to brash, impetuous Faye, the situation is clear: They and their parents have been kidnapped by these terrible men in black, and the only way they're going to escape and rescue their parents is by completing the invention they didn't even know they were all working on an invention that will change the world forever.
But what if the men in black aren't trying to harm the children? What if they're trying to protect them?
And if they're trying to protect them, from what?
An amazing story about the wonders of science and the still greater wonders of friendship, The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Mysterious Men in Black , the first book of the Young Inventors Guild trilogy, is a truly original novel. Young readers will forever treasure Eden Unger Bowditch's funny, inventive, poignant, and wonderfully fun fiction debut.

About the Author

Eden Unger Bowditch has been writing since she was very small. She has been writing since she could use her brain to think of something to say. She wrote while attaining her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and she wrote songs as lead singer of the band Enormous.
She has written stories and plays and shopping lists and screenplays and dreams and poems and also books about her longtime Baltimore home, like Growing Up in Baltimore and Druid Hill Park: The Historic Heart of Baltimore. She has been a journalist, as well as a welder, and an editor, and other things, too.
The Atomic Weight of Secrets is her first young adult novel, and she has been as excited writing it as she hopes you are reading it.
Presently, Eden lives with her family (husband and three children) in Cairo, Egypt. But that s another story entirely . . .

Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bancroft Press (March 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781610880022
• ISBN-13: 978-1610880022