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Reviewed by:
  • Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive! by Ammi-Joan Paquette
  • Elizabeth Bush
Paquette, Ammi-Joan Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive!; by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson. Walden Pond/HarperCollins, 2017 [176p] illus. with photographs
Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-241879-1 $17.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-241882-1 $9.99
Reviewed from galleys         R Gr. 3-6

Truth is much stranger than fiction, as Paquette and Thompson demonstrate in these themed groupings of nature articles, organized to challenge readers to expose the fake within each set (hopefully before they look up the answers in the back of the book). Kids who skip to the end will only suffer from their self-inflicted buzzkill, since the trios of stories all sound so improbable that it takes some determined reasoning and/or searching to ferret out the phony. Take, for instance, the opening sequence of "Crazy Plants," which presents a root vegetable that forms into eerily human shapes as is burrows into its pebbly soil bed; a cloned aspen tree system that is the world's largest organism; and a fungus news network through which forest trees communicate. Each section is supported with all the conventional information book trappings—photographs, maps, charts, sidebar glossaries, and even source notes in the addenda. The game format is flexible enough for individual challenge or team play, and the investigations into Plants/Fungi, Animals, and Humans (and let's not start quibbling here about the separate Animal/Human categories) strongly commend this for classroom use. Hopefully the It's Alive! subtitle is a harbinger of more titles to come; this could be addictive.

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