Max Einstein – The Genius Experiment

James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein's The Genius Experiment is an adventure for 8 year olds about a homeless girl called Max Einstein who has quietly talked her way into university.

What happens

Max is twelve. She sleeps on a stained mattress on the top floor of a New York horse stable, along with Mr Kennedy, Mrs Rabinowitz and half a dozen other people who have nowhere else to go.

She wakes at six with an idea about turning the horses' muck into gas, so the building can be heated for nothing. Mr Kennedy admires the diagram she chalks on his wall. Then he asks what it would cost, and the idea dies on the wall.

This is the shape of her whole life. Brilliant idea, no money, start again.

Her one possession is a battered suitcase she props open like a shrine to Albert Einstein, full of his photographs and his sayings. She built her computer herself out of things New Yorkers left on the pavement. She quietly fixed the records at a university so nobody asks why a twelve-year-old is in the lecture hall, and she deliberately gets C grades so nobody looks twice.

She also has no birth certificate, no family and no idea where her name came from.

Then two men in black suits arrive in the middle of a lecture and haul her out by the arms. They won't show badges. Their van has no official plates. Max works out the physics of a getaway on the spot, and runs.

Reading it is fast and funny and surprisingly gentle. Max explains things as she goes, so a fly buzzing up a carriage while the train hurtles down becomes a lesson in relativity, and a lurch on the Underground becomes Newton. None of it slows the chase down. It's the sort of book where a child picks up four real ideas without noticing.

She's also very good company. She stops two police officers from arresting an elderly neighbour by calmly explaining New York squatters' law at them. She teaches a terrified boy in a foster home how to make slime because she can't think of anything else to say to him.

There are harder things in here. Max is hungry, cold and completely on her own, and her being taken away is genuinely frightening while it lasts. The story she reads online about children of seven mining cobalt for a dollar a day is real, and the book doesn't dress it up. If your reader asks about it afterwards, that's the book working.

Sad, though, never bleak. The squatters look after her and she looks after them, and the whole thing moves too quickly to brood.

What to read next

If they want more of Max, she's back in Rebels With a Cause, still incapable of sitting still and still slipping past the people whose job is knowing where she is.