Benedict Carey - Author

No adventure book or novel can take the place of science class, homework, and a decent teacher. Science is a way of observing, of testing theories and making informed guesses. Skills build incrementally, often through drills or repeated experiments, and a novel cannot and should not be a drill book.

But it can do at least two things and do them well. The first  is simply to introduce important concepts. In "Poison Most Vial," children will learn about toxicology as it is applied in a crime, with limited and ever-changing base of evidence.

In "Unknowns," they will see for themselves how the most famous theorem in math, the Pythagorean Theorem, is derived. This theorem is endlessly valuable throughout high school math, in geometry,  algebra and beyond, and the protagonists in the book figure it out for themselves.They don't merely learn about in class.The book also introduces readers to the most famous number in math - pi. The characters in the book will have to use and understand pi to save the day, and in doing so handle 'messy' numbers, inexact numbers. And so on.

Finally, in both books - this is thing #2 - readers wiill get some advice on how to think about solving problems. How to be creative. How to juggle stuff around. How to visualize numbers and facts to better see how they fit together. How to poke at a problem from different angles until a crack opens up in its hide. These are  the same kind of strategies we all use to solve problems in life, and they are equally important in science. These concepts, and this advice, will be very obvious for teaches or parents to recognize and reinforce.

NOTES ON "UNKNOWNS"

If there's another pre-algebra myster/adventure book out there, I haven't found it. Please email me with suggestions, if you see similar books.

The closest II have found in this area is not a novel but a book which describes a series of fictional encounters, each one presenting a problem. It's called "The Man Who Counted," by Malba Tahan, a pen name for the Brazilian mathematician Helio Marcial de Faria Pereira. I recommend it very highly and found it inspiring throughout the writing of my own book. 

I also relied on several other excellent math guides written for the lay person (and when it comes to math, in my view we are all lay people, with a very few exceptions). One was "Mathematics for the Million," Lancelot Hogben's heroic effort to write a book that explained math to everyone, adults young and old. His enthusiasm is infectious; but Hogben's book quickly becomes rough going and is really for highly motivated adults. 

Morris Kline, a former NYU professor, has written several excellent books explaining math to the rest of us, including "Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician." But these are also for educated adults, not kids ramping up to learn algebra. 

And E. T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" is a good way to get a taste of the history of the field, through short bios of its greatest figures. The prose is overblown, and in places comically over-intellectual. But Bell is trying to put some drama into math history, and good for him. It's badly needed.