Bubble in the Bathtub (Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder) - Softcover

Nesbo, Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416979751 ISBN 13: 9781416979753

Publisher: Aladdin, 2011

Synopsis

Doctor Proctor and the kids (and the fart powder!) are back with a time traveling bathtub and a very special mission! It’s another fart-tastic adventure.

The Fart Powder was such a successful invention that Doctor Proctor, Nilly, and Lisa couldn’t stop there. Next up: a time-travelling bathtub. You just hop in, lather up the Time Soap, and wish for where you’d like to go. Doctor Proctor has plans for this new invention. You see, he lost his true love years ago, when Juliette Margarine married an evil count. The good Doctor has never quite gotten over this, and he's going back to change it. But when things go wrong, it's up to Nilly and Lisa to travel back in time to right all wrongs and reunite the two lovebirds. Nothing is quite so simple in a Jo Nesbo book. Enter a herd of hippos, a scheming assistant, and Time Soap that keeps going awry, sending Nilly and Lisa to the storming of the Bastille! Fortunately, as in every Jo Nesbo book, the Fart Powder solves everything.

About this title

About the Author:

Jo Nesbø is the most successful Norwegian author of all time. He has sold more than 19 million books, which are published in forty-seven different languages globally, and he is widely recognized as one of Europe’s foremost crime writers. The author of crime fiction and short stories, the Doctor Proctor adventures are his first children’s books.

Mike Lowery is an illustrator and fine artist whose work has been seen in galleries and publications internationally. Mike is the illustrator of Moo Hoo and Ribbit Rabbit by Candace Ryan; The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School by Laura Murray; and the Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder novels by Jo Nesbø. Currently he is a professor of illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with a lovely German frau, Katrin, and his super genius daughter, Allister. Visit him at MikeLowery.com.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Postcard from Paris

THERE WAS TOTAL silence in the gymnasium. Nothing was making a sound—not the twelve sets of brown wooden climbing bars along the walls, not the old pommel horse covered in cracked leather, or the eight gray well-worn ropes hanging motionless from the ceiling, or the sixteen boys and girls who made up the DØlgen School Marching Band and who were now all staring at Conductor Madsen.

“Ready ...,” Mr. Madsen called out. He raised his baton, and squinted at them through his dark aviator sunglasses. Mr. Madsen, with dread in his eyes, searched hopefully for Nilly. He knew the other kids in the band teased the redheaded trumpet player because he was so tiny, which of course he was. But unlike the other band members, the little guy had some musical ability. Maybe he could turn things around today. Since Mr. Madsen didn’t see Nilly, he looked over at the only friend Nilly had—Lisa, who played the clarinet. She was the only one in the band who always practiced at home. Maybe there was hope after all.

“Set ...”

Everyone put their instruments to their lips. It was so quiet that the sounds of the warm October afternoon outside could be heard: birds singing, a lawn mower humming, and the laughter of little, snotty-nosed kids playing. But inside the gym it was dark. And it was going to get even darker.

“Go!” Mr. Madsen yelled, swinging his baton in a majestic arc.

At first nothing happened, and the only things you could hear were still birds singing, lawn mowing, and snotty-nosed kids laughing. Then a trumpet gave a wobbly bleat, a clarinet squeaked timidly, and there was a tentative thump on a bass drum. An unexpected beat on a snare drum made a French horn splutter out a belching sound, and in the back of the band something big emitted a snort, one that made Lisa think of a blue whale that had just surfaced after a week underwater. But all that blowing still hadn’t produced an actual note, and Mr. Madsen’s face was already starting to turn that color red that warned he was about to lose his temper.

“Two-three!” Mr. Madsen screamed, swinging his baton as if it were a whip and the band members were the slave crew manning the oars of a Roman galley. “Well, play for Heaven’s sake! This is supposed to be the Marseillaise, the French national anthem! Give it some dignity!”

But there was no dignity in this. The faces in front of Mr. Madsen stared stiffly at the music on the stands in front of them or their eyes were squeezed shut, as if they were sitting on the toilet, straining.

Mr. Madsen gave up and dropped his arms just as the tuba finally emitted a sound—a deep, forlorn mooing sound.

“Stop, stop!” Mr. Madsen yelled, and then waited until the tuba ran out of air again. “If anyone from France had just heard you guys, they would have beheaded you first and then burned you at the stake. Let’s show some respect for the Marseillaise!”

As Mr. Madsen continued to chew them out, Lisa leaned over to the seat next to her and whispered, “I brought that postcard from Doctor Proctor. There’s something weird about it.”

The voice that answered her came from behind a beat-up trumpet. “If it’s like the last one, sounds like a normal postcard if you ask me. ‘Dear Lisa and Nilly, Greetings from Paris. Sincerely, Doctor Proctor.’ Isn’t that pretty much what you said he wrote?”

“Well, yeah, but ...”

“The only thing that’s not normal about it is that a person who is as weird and eccentric as Doctor Proctor would write such a normal postcard.”

They were interrupted by Mr. Madsen’s thunderous voice: “Nilly? Is that you? Are you down there?”

A voice replied from behind the battered trumpet, “Aye aye, Sergeant!”

“Get up so we can see you, Nilly!”

“Yes, sir, oh great commander of delightful music and all the notes of the universe!”

And a little redheaded boy with big freckles and a broad grin jumped up from behind the music stand, onto the chair. Actually, he wasn’t just small, he was tiny. And his hair wasn’t just red, it was bright red. And his grin wasn’t just broad, it practically split his little head in two. And his freckles weren’t just big, they were ... well, all right, they were just big.

“Play the Marseillaise for us, Nilly!” Mr. Madsen growled. “The way it’s supposed to be played.”

“By your command, great mother of all conductors and king of all military band leaders north of the Sahara and east of the—”

“Stop wasting our time and start playing!”

So Nilly started playing. A warm, resounding melody welled up under the roof of the gymnasium and out the window on this warm fall afternoon. When they heard this beautiful music, the birds fell silent, feeling ashamed of their own songs. At least that’s what Lisa was thinking as she sat there listening to her tiny neighbor and very best friend playing his grandfather’s old trumpet. Lisa liked her clarinet, but somehow there was something special about the trumpet. And it wasn’t that hard to play, either. Nilly had taught her to play one song on the trumpet, the Norwegian national anthem. Of course she didn’t play it as well as Nilly, but secretly she dreamed that one day she would play their national anthem in front of a big audience. Imagine it! But imagining is imagining and dreaming is just dreaming.

“Good, Nilly!” called Mr. Madsen. “And now let’s all join in with Nilly! One, two, three!”

And the DØlgen School Marching Band joined in. Staggered, tripped, and stumbled in. Drums, saxophones, French horn, glockenspiel, and cymbals. It sounded like someone had turned a kitchen upside down and now everything was tumbling out of the cupboards and drawers. Then the bass drum and tuba got going. The whole room started shaking. The wooden climbing bars on the wall started chattering, the ropes were hanging at an angle as if there were near gale force winds, and the worn pommel horse starting hopping across the floor, inching its way toward the exit as if it were trying to escape.

When they finally finished the Marseillaise, everything got quiet both inside the gym and out. No birds singing, no children laughing, just the echo of the evil twins’—Truls and Trym’s—final desperate blows to the drumheads and the eardrums.

“Thanks,” Mr. Madsen moaned. “I think that’s enough for today. I’ll see you guys on Monday.”

“I’M SERIOUS. THERE’S something stranger about this new card!” Lisa said as she and Nilly were walking home along Cannon Avenue. It was starting to get dark earlier as winter approached, and they liked that, especially Nilly. He thought the light summer nights they had this far north were a drag, kind of a below-average invention. But the warm, dark autumn nights with lots of darkness to provide cover for a little bit of neighborhood apple stealing—that was a brilliant invention. Actually, it was almost as good as something Doctor Proctor might come up with. Because in Nilly’s opinion, the professor was the best inventor in the world. True, the rest of the world didn’t think Doctor Proctor had invented anything of any value, but what did they know? Who invented the strongest fart powder in the world, for example?

Of course, what was even more important was that Doctor Proctor made the best Jell-O in the world, he was the world’s best friend and neighbor, and had taught Nilly and Lisa that they shouldn’t let it bother them that the rest of the world thought they were a team of pathetic losers. A team consisting of a tiny boy with red sideburns, a timid girl with pigtails, and a much-crazier-than-average professor with sooty motorcycle goggles.

“We know something they don’t,” Proctor liked to say. “We know that when friends promise never to stop helping each other, one plus one plus one is much more than three.”

Truer words had never been spoken. But it had to be said that as a friend, the professor wasn’t much of a letter writer. They had received only a couple of measly postcards in the three months that had passed since the professor had climbed on his motorcycle, put on his leather helmet, and said good-bye as he left Oslo to drive to Paris determined to find the great love of his life, Juliette Margarine.

Doctor Proctor had lost her under mysterious circumstances many, many years before when he had been a student in France. Lisa and Nilly had only seen the picture of Juliette, from back when she and Proctor had been dating, on the wall of the professor’s lab. But they had looked so happy in the picture that it brought tears to Lisa’s eyes. Lisa had actually been the one to convince Doctor Proctor to go back and look for her.

“This one is too strange!” Lisa insisted. “Just look for yourself.”

Nilly looked at the postcard she handed him.

“Hm,” he mumbled. He stopped right under the next streetlight and studied it intently while mumbling several hms which all sounded thoughtful and intelligent.

“It’s from Paris,” Lisa said, pointing to the black-and-white picture that looked like it had been taken on an overcast morning. It showed a large, open square and aside from a bunch of people walking around with parasols and top hats, the square seemed strangely empty. The only way you could tell that it was actually the world-renowned capital of France was that the word PARIS was printed across the bottom of the picture.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Nilly mumbled, lost in thought.

“Which is what?”

“That it seems like something is missing from this square. Well, I guess, I mean in the p...

About this edition

• Publisher: Aladdin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1416979751
• ISBN 13: 9781416979753
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448
• Illustrator: Lowery Mike