Jarod and the Mystery of the Joshua Trees

In this first novel of the National Park Adventure Series, sixteen-year-old Darrell Freeman narrates the story of his ten-year-old brother Jarod and their strange camping experiences among the weird trees and peculiar critters of Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert. While their Mom, a book illustrator, pursues her art, the boys take off in their vintage orange VW camper bus to see the park. Jarod, an "indigo child" with psychic abilities, is able to call up the native critters and talk with the Joshua Trees and granite boulders that are scattered everywhere. Thus the brothers learn that the area is not only ancient but sacred, and that the trees and boulders need help-their help. The park lies between two Earth faults and the Earth is beginning to rumble. The brothers start their quest at once to find the special tree and particular boulder that will tell them what to do. Meanwhile, a lady and man in a black SUV start their own quest to find the brothers and steal the strange buzzing rock Jarod found the first day. What causes the rock to buzz? No one knows. Before the tale is done the SUV people steal the rock, but the boys recover it with the help of a mysterious Indian shaman. Then they must find the "proper resting place" to bury the rock to stabilize the park. Do they succeed? JANICE BEATY, Professor Emerita Elmira College, is well known in the field of Early Childhood Education for her many college textbooks with Skills for Preschool Teachers, Observing Development of the Young Child, and Preschool Appropriate Practices becoming classics in the field and being translated into Chinese. But the middle school students she taught in upstate New York and on Guam in the Pacific, will always have a special place in her heart (and in her book Nufu and the Turkeyfish). Her travels have taken her the world over including to England, Russia, China, and the Philippines. She is a non-stop writer these days, creating Jarod books about favorite American Southwestern National Parks she has visited while living in Cottonwood, Arizona and Taos, New Mexico.