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    Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!
    Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!
    Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!
    Ebook157 pages1 hour

    Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!

    By Frances O'Roark Dowell and Preston McDaniels

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    About this ebook

    Houston, we have a problem! Phineas L. MacGuire (a.k.a. Mac), is less than up-to-date on planetary happenings. (Marsquakes? Who knew?) If he’s going to be the best scientist in the fourth grade, Mac has to set his sights a little higher. Well, actually a lot higher: Outer Space. But, space camp is expensive and Mac’s mom says he can go only if he earns the money himself. But, where is he going to find enough money for a week on Mars (or a pretty close simulation thereof)? Houston, we have another problem: a gigantic, slobbery dog named Lemon Drop. Mac can earn the money he needs walking Mrs. McClosky’s Yellow Lab, but first he needs to survive the walks! Good thing Mac is a scientific genius with friends like Ben and Aretha. Together the three of them discovers that Lemon Drop is no ordinary dog—that Lab is a real-life Lab-oratory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateJun 28, 2011
    ISBN9781442423947
    Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!
    Author

    Frances O'Roark Dowell

    Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Award; Where I’d Like to Be; The Secret Language of Girls and its sequels The Kind of Friends We Used to Be and The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker, which received three starred reviews; Anybody Shining; Ten Miles Past Normal; Trouble the Water; the Sam the Man series; The Class; How to Build a Story; and most recently, Hazard. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. Connect with Frances online at FrancesDowell.com.

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      Book preview

      Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off! - Frances O'Roark Dowell

      PHINEAS L. MACGUIRE …

      Atheneum Books for Young Readers • An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

      www.SimonandSchuster.com • This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Text copyright © 2008 by Frances O’Roark Dowell • Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Preston McDaniels • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • Book design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian and Michael McCartney • The text for this book is set in GarthGraphic. • The illustrations for this book were rendered in pencil. • Manufactured in the United States of America • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 • Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Dowell, Frances O’Roark. • Phineas L. MacGuire … blasts off! / Frances O’Roark Dowell; illustrated by Preston McDaniels. —1st ed. • p. cm. • Summary: Hoping to earn money to attend Space Camp, fourth-grade science whiz Phineas MacGuire gets a job as a dog walker, then enlists the aid of his friends Ben and Aretha to help with experiments using the dog’s slobber. • ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-2689-4 • ISBN-10: 1-4169-2689-5 eISBN-13: 978-1-4424-2394-7 • [1. Moneymaking projects—Fiction. 2. Science—Experiments—Fiction. 3. Dogs—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. McDaniels, Preston, ill. II. Title. • PZ7.D75455Phb 2008 • [Fic]—dc22 • 2007030162

      Other books by Frances O’Roark Dowell

      Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!

      Phineas L. MacGuire … Gets Slimed!

      Dovey Coe

      Where I’d Like to Be

      The Secret Language of Girls

      Chicken Boy

      Shooting the Moon

      To Spencer Graham, Sam Loyack, and Aidan Paul—great friends, smart guys

      —F. O. D.

      The author would like to thank

      the following people for their support,

      wisdom and joie de vivre: Caitlyn Dlouhy;

      Kiley Fitzsimmons; Amy Graham; Danielle Paul;

      Tom, Kathryn, and Megan Harris; and Clifton,

      Jack, and Will Dowell. She would like to thank

      T. J. Mukundan for his insights about Space Camp.

      PHINEAS L. MACGUIRE …

      BLASTS OFF!

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      chapter one

      My name is Phineas Listerman

      MacGuire.

      Feel free to call me Mac.

      Some people even call me Big Mac, since I’m tall for my age.

      I don’t mind being called Phin or Phineas. I had a soccer coach last year who only called me MacGuire.

      I thought that was sort of cool.

      He never called me Listerman, in case you were wondering.

      No one calls me Listerman. Not unless they want to get seriously slimed.

      I am a scientist. In fact, I am probably the best fourth-grade scientist in all of Woodbrook Elementary School. I am an expert in the following areas of scientific inquiry:

      1. All molds and fungi, particularly slime molds of every variety

      2. Volcanoes and other things that explode

      3. Bug identification

      Up until yesterday I had no idea that I was a potential scientific genius when it came to astronomy, which is, if you didn’t know, the study of planets and stars and everything up in space.

      Don’t get me wrong. I have read at least sixty-seven astronomy books and am famous for having eaten a board book about the planets when I was two.

      It’s just astronomy wasn’t one of my big things.

      Until I heard about Space Camp.

      It all started with Stacey Windham, and Share and Stare.

      You would think that as a scientist, I would know five hundred times as much about space as Stacey Windham, a bossy girl in my class who thinks she is the queen and has never once shown any interest in anything besides being mean to people.

      So how did she know that there are earthquakes on Mars before I did?

      Except on Mars they’re called Mars-quakes.

      You’d think I would have heard about that.

      Some scientists think that Mars at one time had titanic plates in it, just like Earth does, Stacey reported for Share and Stare yesterday morning. Share and Stare is what Mrs. Tuttle, our teacher, has instead of Show and Tell. For Share and Stare you have to bring something that’s connected to what we’re studying at school. We have just started a unit on space, and Stacey waved an article torn out of a magazine while she talked.

      "I’m interested in titanic plates because I have seen the movie Titanic four times, Stacey continued. Even though it is rated PG-13."

      A bunch of girls gasped. I raised my hand. Stacey nodded at me like she was the teacher.

      I think you mean ‘tectonic plates,’ I informed her. Tectonic plates are what shift around and cause earthquakes.

      "Well, I’ve still seen Titanic four times. And it’s rated PG-13. Stacey sneered at me. I bet you’ve never seen one single PG-13 movie."

      Half of my classmates waved their hands in the air. Oooh! I have! I have!

      Later I asked Stacey where she’d found the article, and she showed me a copy of a magazine called Astronomy. It’s my dad’s, she said. He has a telescope. Except he’s always too busy to use it. Sometimes when I have a slumber party, we use it for spying on the people who live across the street.

      I sighed. Leave it to Stacey Windham to take a perfectly good scientific tool like a telescope and use it for evil.

      Tonight at dinner I asked my mom if we could get a subscription to Astronomy magazine. She gave me

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