Product Description

The whine of jet engines thunders from above as the giant Air Force bomber makes its approach to Westport Field. Suddenly, the citizens of Mammoth Falls are startled to see the bomb bay doors open and an object drop down, down, directly into Strawberry lake. Splash!

And what is that object? Why a bomb, what else? Not just a common, ordinary, conventional bomb, but an atomic bomb! That's just the beginning of the latest (actually the first) madcap adventure - book-length this time - of that outrageous, notorious threat to municipal sanity known as The Mad Scientists' Club. As you know, with these boys anything can happen, and it does!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75893 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 238 pages

Review
...fast-paced...realistic dialogue and action, likeable characters who use brains and logic to solve their problems, lots of humor. -- Christian Library Journal, April 2004

For better or worse (better, I think) the Mad Scientists' Club was a major influence in my youth. -- Glenn H. Reynolds -- InstaPundit.com, October 11, 2004

May there always be Mad Scientists among us! -- Homer Hickam, author of October Sky

Customer Reviews

Classic Adventure - for kids or adults
I'm so glad this is finally available.

I fondly remembered the Mad Scientist's Club stories which a teacher read to our fifth grade class in the early seventies. I soon bought the books for myself and read them several times over the years.

When my daughter was seven (just a couple of years ago) I read them to her and she (more accurately we) enjoyed them thoroughly. While browsing eBay one day I discovered there existed a "prequel" novel - The Big Kerplop - which was published in a very limited edition (1000 copies if I remember right).

I eventually obtained one at the "bargain" price of $$$ - by far the lowest price I found in 6 months of searching. I gave it to my daughter for Christmas (it's well cared for and stored safely) and read it to her over the next week.

Amazingly enough it surpasses the quality of the short stories and I felt it was worth every penny.

Now that it's available at one tenth what I paid for it I recommend it unreservedly. It's self contained and doesn't require familiarity with the other stories but I still recommend you read The Mad Scientist's Club and The New Adventures of The Mad Scientist's Club first so you can really savor The Big Kerplop. All high quality youth literature.

A dream come true
The magic of Brinley's Mad Scientists' Club is its combination of adolescent fantasy with the real world. Where else can a bunch of brainy small town kids become heroes not by stepping through a portal to some fantasy world but by knowing more about our world's natural laws than the adults who surround them? This novel works best as a prequel to the collections of tales found in Brinley's first two books, which are childhood favorites of mine. However, the story stands on its own, and its scope eclipses those earlier short stories. The Air Force has lost an atomic bomb in the town's Strawberry Lake, and only the Mad Scientists' ingenuity can save the day! At first this gang of adolescents can't get the grownups to listen, but they soon prove their worth. Likewise, I recommend that you give them a chance. They won't let you down.

Stick with the First Two Books
I searched for this book for years. I loved and still love both the original and The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, and so I scoured bookstores to try to find this elusive prequel (only a thousand copies printed in 1974). Then came this reprint, and I ordered it and was promptly disappointed.

There's only three chapters that have anything like the earlier works - the boys out in a boat on a lake at night, evading the police in a search boat. Good stuff. But the rest of the novel is all about the town councilors and police chief and reporters and Air Force officers. They just go on and on about nothing, so that you start flipping ahead to get back to the boys.

If you were to cut all that out, you'd get a story the length of one of the originals, but even then this story doesn't work because the boys don't actually have much of a hand in the outcome of the story. And it bogs down, as when, at the end, the general goes off to oversee the diving, and the boys are taken to a hotel restaurant by a reporter. We're then given two full pages describing the hotel, and then another page of talking about food, and finally they get back to the fact that they need a way to get to the lake. Even then, when they get there, everything goes basically well, and they get celebrated, so that there's no surprises or action or interesting climax at all.

In short, as much as I'd love to praise this book, you might find it best to stick with the originals.