Fuzzy Mud is a well-written and engaging look at biochemistry, math, bullying, bravery, cowardice, and making moral choices. Those disparate subject areas and themes in the lives of fifth grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi and seventh graders Marshal Walsh and Chad Hillegas form the glue that holds this novel together and make for a satisfying near-apocalypse story for middle grade readers.

It’s the “fuzzy mud” that’s the problem. The self-replicating microorganisms that are supposed to be a new fuel that will revolutionize the energy and fuel businesses may be out of control. And Tamaya, Marshall, and Chad are about to step into —literally—a big mess that makes their small problems with bullying and being bullied look really small.

Louis Sachar, the talented author of the Newbery Award winning Holes, as well as many other favorite middle grade and young adult novels, has written a great book. And it’s short, only 180 pages, a plus for reluctant readers who want a book that doesn’t take them a year to finish reading. The only issue I had with the book was the population scare statistics that are used to show the importance of developing a new, inexpensive biofuel. I have a thing about population alarmists: I don’t believe them. When I was in high school, back in the dark ages of the nineteen seventies, I was told that we were running out fuel and food and every other resource and that if people didn’t quit having so many babies the world was going to DIE OF STARVATION!

I read Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb. I believed that the world was in crisis, and that children were the enemy.

“Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.’ He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair ‘England will not exist in the year 2000.’ Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.’ By ‘the end,’ he meant ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.'” NY Times Special Report

Anyone who is reading this post knows that Ehrlich’s dire predictions didn’t come true. I learned more and read more and went on to have eight children. And I resent reading a new, updated version of the old scare stats in a children’s book. I really think the “overpopulation” propaganda could have been left out of the book.

Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, the book was enjoyable, and I would recommend that you read it for the story and just ignore the over-population junk science.

I picked this book up because I really liked Ms. Baskin’s book Anything But Typical, about a boy with autism. Ruby on the Outside sounded as if it had a good premise: “Eleven year old Ruby Danes is about to start middle school, yet no one in her life, other than her aunt, knows her deepest, darkest secret—her mother is in prison.” (inside cover blurb)

But, big but, the story itself is rather slight. Lots of emotions are packed into the book’s 163 pages, but not much actually happens. Ruby goes to visit her mom at the prison. Ruby remembers visiting her mom at the prison. Ruby makes a new friend, Margalit. Ruby is afraid Margalit will find out that Ruby’s mom is in prison. Ruby and Margalit write a story and draw pictures together.

If that had been the only problem with the book, I might have just given it an “E” for effort and gone on to the next book. But I’m about to go on a campaign, a picky little “Bring Back the Copyeditors” campaign. This book is the third one I’ve read in the past month, all published by major publishers for Pete’s sake, with multiple misprints and errors. If I were Ms. Baskin, I’d be angry and upset. Isn’t it the publisher’s responsibility to hire a decent copyeditor and make sure the book goes to press as error-free as possible? I stumbled over several places in this novel where a word had obviously been omitted or repeated erroneously. These are common mistakes that will be found in any manuscript, but the novel should never, never be published with the mistakes and typos uncorrected. Are the copyeditors on strike? Is is considered sufficient these days just to spell check a manuscript with the computer and then publish it?

If someone in publishing can tell me why I am finding so many children’s books lately with multiple printing errors, I would appreciate being educated. Can the publishers not afford to hire copyeditors? In the meantime, if you are a children’s author, I would suggest that you hire your own copyeditor before even a major publisher publishes your book. It’s a shame, but someone needs to do the job.

Lost in the Sun reminded me of one of my favorite middle grade fiction authors, Gary Schmidt and his book, Okay for Now, and that’s high praise because I loved Okay for Now. A few of the plot developments seemed a little too coincidental or out of the ordinary to be believed, but I was willing to suspend disbelief because I really cared about the characters and wanted to see them come to some kind of resolution, or even victory.

Trent Zimmerman is the middle son of a divorced mom and dad. He lives with his mom and his two brothers, Aaron and Doug, and he visits his dad and stepmom when he must. However, Trent is convinced that everyone, especially his dad, hates him and sees him as a “screw-up” because of something that happened about six months before the opening of the story. That’s when Trent killed his fellow hockey-player, Jared, with a hockey puck to the chest. Although the hit was unintentional and no one knew that Jared had a heart condition that combined with the hockey puck to send him into cardiac arrest, Trent knows that it’s still his fault that Jared is dead. And everyone else knows it, too.

So, we have Trent, a lost kid with anger issues, and then in chapter two we meet Fallon Little, the girl with the scar. Fallon helps to diffuse a situation with Trent and some bullies, and then, she refuses to go away, doing everything within her power to become Trent’s friend. Only Trent is so self-centered and lost in his anger and regret that he barely has time or energy for friendship. And Fallon has issues of her own. Whenever people ask how she got the scar that traverses her face from her left eyebrow down to the right corner of her mouth, she tells a different story. Maybe she was mauled by a a grizzly bear. Or slapped by a manatee. Or maybe she has amnesia and can’t remember how she got the scar.

The book gives attentive readers lots of answers about Trent and how he got to be so frightened and angry and what he needs to do to recover and move on with his life, but Fallon remains a mystery to some extent. Why does she wear such odd clothing combinations? Why does she want to be friends with Trent? Why is her father so silent and unapproachable? How did she really get that scar? None of these questions is really answered satisfactorily, although I could make a guess at some of the answers. Maybe that’s because the story is told in first person from Trent’s point of view, and Trent isn’t the most perceptive or pathetic character on the block. In fact, as the story begins and Trent starts sixth grade (middle school), he’s a smart aleck who picks fights and hates his dad, his teachers, his classmates, and himself.

Some good questions to explore with middle grade readers of Lost in the Sun:

Why does Trent hate everybody? Why does he believe they all hate him?

Are there any hints in the story about how Fallon got the scar? How do you think Fallon got her scar?

I won’t give away the ending, but I rather liked it. And I’m not usually a fan of this particular type of conclusion.