Math Mysteries: The Fall Festival Fiasco

by Aaron Starmer, Marta Kissi (Illustrator)

Overview

A page-turning mystery brimming with lighthearted intrigue and essential middle-grade math skills, Math Mysteries: The Fall Festival Fiasco by author Aaron Starmer will have readers on the edge of their seats as they unravel the who-done it using math. Perfect for both mystery and math lovers, as well as kids who love puzzles, riddles, brainteasers, and adventure stories!

Autumn has arrived and the fourth graders at Arthimos Elementary couldn't be more excited for the Fall Festival! But when the tickets go missing, the pie eating contest is sabotoged, and a suspiciously humongous pumpkin shows up, will anyone be able to save the day and catch the culprit? The school's best (and only) investigators are on the case, The Prime Detectives—Abby “the Abacus” Feldstein, Cameron “Cam” McGill, and Gabriel “Gabe” Kim. Using arithmetic, geometry, and logic, the Prime Detectives will stop at nothing to figure out who did what, when, and why!

Contains multiple, interlinked mysteries that readers help solve using math. Includes answers showing step-by-step solutions.

Also from the MATH MYSTERIES series:

- The Triplet Threat

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250841797
Publisher:	Odd Dot
Publication date:	09/10/2024
Series:	Math Mysteries , #2
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

About the Author

Aaron Starmer was born in northern California, raised in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York, and educated at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His novels for young readers include The Storyteller, The Whisper, and The Riverman. He lives with his family in Stowe, Vermont.

Marta Kissi is a Bath based illustrator, originally from Warsaw. She studied BA Illustration & Animation at Kingston University and MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art. Her favorite part of being an illustrator is bringing stories to life by designing charming characters and the wonderful worlds they live in. She shares her artist studio with her husband James and their pet plant Trevor.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/01/2024

Gr 3 Up—Math teachers rejoice! Fantastic read-alouds to intrigue even your biggest math skeptics. The Prime Detectives, Abby, Cam, and Gabe, take readers through a batch of mysteries and solve them using their powers of deduction and remarkable math skills. A series of mishaps that threatened to wreck the Fall Festival seem like accidents on the surface, but the Prime Detectives know there's more than meets the eye. As sabotage efforts to rig the contests for pie-eating, pumpkin-weighing, and the dunk tank become clear, students learn the value of math to solve real life problems. Using statistics, globes, algebra, and computer science, the trio manages to save the day and the funds raised by the annual Fall Festival. A fresh, compelling narrative will keep readers engaged and curious about all the chaos unfolding. Clear, explicit math examples and explanations will leave them willing and wanting to learn more. VERDICT This title will be a hit with students and teachers alike.

School Library Journal

2024-05-31
A trio of fourth graders known as the Prime Detectives count up the clues to find out who’s sabotaging Arithmos Elementary’s fall festival.

In this series outing, mathematical mavens Abby Feldstein, Cam McGill, and Gabe Kim—who respectively present as white, Black, and Asian in Kissi’s cartoon line drawings—show each step of their work in boxed-out segments as they track a classmate’s spending, calculate the odds of dunking their teacher at a dunk-tank challenge, estimate the weights of outsize pumpkins, and engage in other real-life arithmetical operations. All the while, they also assemble evidence that various events at the annual festival have been deliberately sabotaged and reason their way to a culprit. The relentlessly instructional narrative also offers such non-mathematical tidbits as a mnemonic for how to spellFebruary (“The rumor is that there are twoR s in it!”), the value of a “memory palace” (a technique for recalling important things), and that there really is an African country called Eswatini (known as Swaziland until 2018), even if many recent maps don’t show it. In any case, the saboteur’s motives and the outcomes turn out to be relatively benign, and the episode winds its way to a peaceful close, with just a tantalizing hint that things may get “weird” next time around. Final art not seen.

There’s a bona fide mystery, but most of the solving goes by the numbers.(Fiction. 7-10)

Kirkus Reviews