Vega is not exactly eager to go but makes a deal with Wes, agreeing to try out camp as long as he tries to make a new friend too. Vega’s dad Javi thinks making new friends will help her adjust, so he signs her up for Camp Very Best Friend, which is designed to help introverted local children build new friendships. Vega is not happy about this change and doesn’t want to leave her best friend behind, worrying they will grow apart. When astronomy-obsessed 9-year-old Vega’s dad Wes gets a new job, the family moves from Portland to Seattle. Rockliff and Bruno’s playful approach buoys solid science and history.Īfter moving to a new city, a girl attends a wilderness camp to help her make new friends. Rockliff points out that Franklin’s blind-test technique is in use today for medical treatments, and both the placebo effect and hypnosis are studied today. The tale is nicely pitched to emphasize the importance of a hypothesis, testing and verification, and several inset text boxes are used to explain these scientific tools. Bruno’s digitally colored pencil art lightly evokes period caricature and gently pokes fun at the ornate clothing and hair of French nobility.

Text displayed in ribbons, a couple of late-18th-century typefaces and other flourishes create a sense of time and place. Franklin’s hypothesis-that results were accounted for by the subject’s imagination and not an external force-is quickly proved. In Rockliff’s account, Franklin observes Mesmer’s colleague, Charles D’Eslon, at work, then tinkers with Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” technique by blindfolding and misdirecting D’Eslon’s subjects. Among the scientists and doctors asked to report was the American emissary Benjamin Franklin. Franz Mesmer-who seemed to wield a powerful, mysterious method of healing.

Louis XVI commissioned a study when he became concerned about the number of complaints he was hearing from French doctors about a German-Dr. Ben Franklin’s several years in France during the American Revolution included an occasion on which he consulted on a scientific matter for the French king.

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