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Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive!

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Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive!

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Overview

“Considering the fresh attention being paid to teaching a skeptical approach to information evaluation, this series opener couldn’t be better timed. A brief but savvy guide to responsible research methods adds further luster to this crowd pleaser.” —ALA Booklist (starred review)

Two Truths and a Lie is the first book in a fascinating new series that presents some of the most crazy-but-true stories about the living world as well as a handful of stories that are too crazy to be true—and asks readers to separate facts from fakes!

Did you know that there is a fungus that can control the mind of an ant and make it do its bidding? Would you believe there is such a thing as a corpse flower—a ten-foot-tall plant with a blossom that smells like a zombie? How about a species of octopus that doesn’t live in water but rather lurks in trees in the Pacific Northwest?

Every story in this book is strange and astounding. But not all of them are real. Just like the old game in this book’s title, two out of every three stories are completely true and one is an outright lie. Can you guess which? It’s not going to be easy. Some false stories are based on truth, and some of the true stories are just plain unbelievable. And they’re all accompanied by dozens of photos, maps, and illustrations. Amaze yourself and trick your friends as you sort out the fakes from the facts!

Acclaimed authors Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson have teamed up to create a series of sneaky stories about the natural world designed to amaze, disgust, and occasionally bamboozle you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062418814
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/22/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	203,425
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1010L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Ammi-Joan Paquette loves caves, hates mushy bananas, and is ambivalent about capybaras. She is the coauthor of the Two Truths and a Lie series and the author of the novels Rules for Ghosting, Paradox, and Nowhere Girl as well as the Princess Juniper series and many more. She is also the recipient of a PEN/New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award honor. Joan lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, where she balances her own writing with her day job as a literary agent. You can visit her online at www.ajpaquette.com.

Laurie Ann Thompson loves capybaras, hates caves, and is ambivalent about mushy bananas. She is the coauthor of the Two Truths and a Lie series and author of several award-winning nonfiction books, including Emmanuel’s Dream, a picture book biography of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, which was the recipient of the Schneider Family Book Award and was named an ALA Notable Book and a CCBC Choice, among other accolades. She lives outside Seattle with her family, and you can visit her online at www.lauriethompson.com.

Introduction ix

Part 1 Preposterous Plants and Fungi-Crazy, Creepy, Cool 1

Chapter 1 Crazy Plants 2

A Underground Miracle Root 2

B Pandomonium 6

C The Secret Lives of Plants 10

Chapter 2 Creepy Plants (and Fungi) 15

A The Flowery Smell of Death 15

B Eyes Watching from the Darkness 20

C A Fungus among Us 24

Chapter 3 Cool Plants 28

A Watch Your Step! 28

B Let There Be Flower Power! 33

C The Sweet Truth 38

Part 2 Astonishing Animals-Small, Medium, Large 42

Chapter 4 Small Animals 43

A Puppy's Got a Brand-New Pal 43

B The Tiny Guardians of Your Bookshelf 48

C Mighty Mollusks 51

Chapter 5 Medium Animals 56

A Invasion of the Tree Octopods 56

B The Extraordinary, Extra-Cranial Life of Mike 60

C Olmy Goodness, Tiny Dragons! 64

Chapter 6 Large Animals 69

A Discovering Prehistoric Bambi 69

B Megaconda-Myth No More 74

C Gelatinous Curtain of Death 79

Part 3 How about Humans-Yes! Noooo. Maybe? 84

Chapter 7 Humans-Yes! 85

A Poop to the Rescue 85

B Frankenstein's Fix 89

C Pee Power! 93

Chapter 8 Humans-Noooo 98

A A Brief History of the World in Hiccups 98

B Me, Myself, and…Who? 102

C I Spy with My X-Ray Eyes 106

Chapter 9 Humans-Maybe? 110

A The Cure for the Common Wallflower 110

B The Bloody Fountain of Youth 115

C Remote-Controlled…Brains?! 119

Research Guide 123

Answer Guide 127

Bibliography 136

Photograph Credits 154

Index 156

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

An engaging, entertaining compendium that will inform and confound.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

05/22/2017
Each chapter of this highly entertaining volume, first in a series, recounts three hard-to-believe stories that revolve around plants, animals, or humans. But only two of them are true, leaving it to readers to identify the invented one. In one example, the choices include a tree-dwelling octopus, a headless chicken, or tiny, cave-dwelling dragons. Spoiler alert: there’s no such thing as a tree octopus, though the authors’ description of it is persuasive (“In the early 2000s, the tree octopus was on the verge of extinction, but a strong grassroots campaign by dedicated Pacific Northwest communities helped reverse that”). Color infographics and photographs—some real, others fabricated—blur the truth further (one photo in the aforementioned chapter shows a bald eagle in flight, with an octopus in its talons). Readers can also have fun finding the false entries in 10-item lists of dinosaur names, diseases, body parts, and more. The authors’ casual tone should easily draw readers in, and activities at the end of each chapter underscore a key goal underneath all the fun: developing critical thinking skills. Ages 8–12. Authors’ agent: Erin Murphy, Erin Murphy Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

05/01/2017
Gr 4–7—The authors have essentially created a kid's version of the popular NPR program Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me (in which adults compete to determine which news story is false); however, in this case, the emphasis is on science rather than current events. There are nine chapters in total, each devoted to quirky stories related to a different topic (e.g., plants, animals, humans). Each chapter contains three tales: two true and one false. Readers are instructed to use their research skills in order to differentiate between fact and fiction, and to that end a "Research Guide" is included, offering tips such as how to evaluate Internet sources for authority, accuracy, and reliability. An "Answer Guide" explains which of the three stories in each chapter is false and why, and an extensive bibliography cites sources. Kid-friendly text and colorful sidebars and images combine to create an overall attention-grabbing effect. VERDICT Providing a framework from which to develop the tools necessary to think critically about information, this title is a fun and potentially useful curricular tool for teachers and librarians, as well as an entertaining read for tween science fans.—Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn

School Library Journal

2017-03-06
With "fake news" now such a prominent topic of conversation, a book that asks readers to separate bizarre but true stories about nature from fake ones is quite timely. This is the first of a series that presents Ripley's Believe It or Not-type true stories about the natural world alongside Barnum-esque fabrications and challenges readers to discern the real from the fake. Two out of every three stories are completely true, and one is an outright lie. Some false stories are based on fact, and others are complete imagination. All the stories are accompanied by color photos, maps, and illustrations. Some of the strange but true subjects include fungus-infected zombie ants, book scorpions, and a chicken named Mike that lived for several years after being beheaded. The fabrications include a walking moss that feeds off decomposing animals, the worm-size African threadsnake that lives in the ears of wild dogs and consumes earwax, and the Amazon "megaconda." Unlike the bogus tree octopuses that supposedly inhabit trees in the Pacific Northwest, most of these invented phenomena are convincing and difficult to separate from the real. It is up to readers to sort out the fakes from the facts. Sound advice is given on how to seek and evaluate information online, and, for the impatient, the fakes are revealed in an appendix. An engaging, entertaining compendium that will inform and confound. (photos, maps, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews

Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive!

Two Truths and a Lie: It's Alive!

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Paperback(Reprint)

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