Review Detail

Ella doesn't like math because she struggles so much with it that she may have to have a tutor over the summer to help reinforce her skills. She doesn't want to spend her time doing that, so she hopes that she can bring her math grade up and avoid it. The problem? The teacher cancels the tests for the rest of the year and decides to have a math fair instead. Ella is assigned to a good group, but the topic, time conversions, is one with which she struggled. And it's worth two test grades! Her friends Jolina and Lucille, as well as Jonathan, offer to help as much as they can, and the group decides that they will picture a lot of animals, and convert their average life expectancies into hours, minutes and seconds. The idea comes from the fact that an opossum died on the school grounds, wasn't cleaned up, and ended up "catching" a soccer ball. (Hence the cover.) Ella has other problems as well; her free-wheeling photographer aunt is having renovations done on her condo and is bunking with Ella. So is her dog, Chewy. Ella is very particular about her room, so this stresses her out a lot. As the math fair approaches, things continue to go wrong in spectacular fashions. Will Ella end up having to spend her summer working on math, even after all of her hard work?