Amberly Media Center

All day long her teachers yell “Clementine-pay-attention!” The problem is that she IS paying attention: to what’s going on outside the classroom window, to her maybe best friend Margaret who is trying to cut glue out of her hair, and to other things going on at school that land Clementine in trouble. And Clementine has lots of “interesting” solutions to problems. To help Margaret, she suggests cutting a few more patches out of her hair. When Margaret ends up cutting off almost all her hair, Clementine suggests drawing curls with her mom’s permanent markers. All of which lands Clementine in big trouble. Clementine also “pays attention” at home. Her father is the manager of their apartment building and one of his daily problems is keeping the pigeons from making a mess all over the front of the building. Then one day Clementine notices that a woman who lives in the building feeds the pigeons out the window and comes up with the perfect solution to her dad’s problem: feed the pigeons somewhere else.

You’ll enjoy Clementine’s hilarious problems and cheer when she finally gets recognized for paying attention to the right things once in awhile/

If you could go back in time where would you go? Johnny Maxwell knows exactly where, or should I say “when”–May 21, 1941. That’s the day the German’s accidentally bombed his hometown. Johnny knows that if he goes back and changes things there will be consequences, but if he can just warn the right people in time, the air raid sirens will go off and innocent people might be saved.

I liked the way Terry Pratchett mixes humor and adventure and makes the reader think about time. Johnny’s “sidekicks” are all interesting characters who play important roles in the story.

This is the third book in the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, but each book is a separate and complete story that doesn’t rely on the reader knowing what happened in the previous books.