Saved by the Smell

A boy gets buried in dirty laundry and pulled into time travel shenanigans after his mom’s latest experiment in this first book in the My Mad Scientist Mom chapter book series from acclaimed author-illustrator Jarrett Lerner.

Ari’s life is pretty simple, filled with school, video games, and his pet turtle, Fred, but his mom is a mad scientist—or big-hearted genius, as Ari says—who strives to make people’s lives better by solving problems that other scientists usually overlook. She’s always working away in the basement with the help of TED, her tiny supercomputer who annoys Ari to no end.

When one of Mom’s experiments ends up in an explosion of mounds and mounds of dirty laundry, she devises a time portal to fix things. But could a mad scientist’s time portal cause even more trouble for Ari and his mom?