11 year old Nicholas is a very smart outsider with no friends and a fascination with prime numbers. His long lost grandfather shows up in his life with tales of lost heirlooms, but unfortunately he is suffering from dementia and can't remember where he hid them. He promises that if they could be found they are valuable enough to help Nicholas and his mother save their house. Two of Nicholas's unlikely classmates become involved, along with another grandfather, and all together they undertake the mission to find those heirlooms, finding friendship along the way. ( )

Nicholas’s family is plagued with problems and in danger of foreclosing on their house, so when his grandfather with dementia is released from prison and talks about buried heirlooms, Nicholas is determined to find them. The charm of the book from a mathematical perspective is its language. Nicholas is obsessed with prime numbers: “Big numbers only happen on years that you’re a prime” he says ”When I was two, our dog got hit by a truck. When I was three, our kitchen caught on fire. When I was five, I broke my leg…When I was seven my mom got pregnant and my brother was born and died. When I turned eleven, my dad got fired from the factory” (p. 4). A mixture of adventure and mystery, this book steeped with math language would make a great read aloud. Have the students note the metaphorical use of math terms and appreciate the protagonist’s love for math: “Do you speak binary?’ (p. 169. To engender cross-curricular connections, English language arts teachers could share this title and work with the math teacher exploring the math concepts. Additionally, the title would be a good outside reading or summer reading for a math class. ( )

WOW! Don't judge a book by its cover! This is Louis Sacharesque in its look at the powerlessness that children feel and how being different makes you stand out from the crowd. Nicholas is 11 but is in Grade 7 ( he has been accelerated 2 years) and is doing a Year 11 Maths subject because he his so fantastic at Maths and Music. As a result of this, he is treated like a "freak" at school - he eats his lunch in a toilet stall - has no friends and has to share a locker with the school's thief and dog boy Zeke who is also a freak. Nicholas is currently even further upset by his father having lost his job and left town to find work, and his mother threatening to sell their house; even though the yard has a tree planted in it in memory of his baby brother who died , that Nicholas actually believes is his brother! Compound that with a grandfather he thought was dead suddenly turning up after 30 years in prison and life is about to get very strange. Grandpa Rose is in the first stages of dementia, but in his lucid moments, he tells Nicholas that he has buried some family hierlooms that, if sold, will mean that his parents won't have to sell the house. He is convinced his grandfather is telling the truth, so he helps him escape from the nursing home, together with another freak Jordan who's grandfather is sane but just wants to die because life isn't worth living. Both grandfathers are hidden in the town's resident ghost house, which turns out to have been built by Nicholas' great grandfather, for an entire week. During that time, the three boys use the clues from tattoos on Grandpa Rose, ( and the memories recorded by Jordan's Grandpa talking to Grandpa Rose) to try and find the treasure. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic; this is a brilliant book about finding friendship in the strangest places and how your assumptions about someone and their life, from what you know at school, can often be so wrong. Loved it!
Highly recommended for Grade 5 upwards. ( )