Magic works? Can it save Cal's family's farm?Twelve-year-old Cal and his best friend, Drew, are momentarily distracted from Cal's family's problemscaused in no small part by Cal when he accidentally started a fire in the harvesterwhen they learn that classmate Modesty can practice magic. She's found a binder of magic spells, but they work only for a minute and only at certain times of the day, and most of the spells are 800-word tongue twisters that can't be said in under one minute. In puzzling this out, they end up discovering that in a parallel world called Congroo, magic is imperiled because its dragons are dying. With the help of Preface Arrowshot, a young, green-skinned Congruent librarian, the kids discover that the local entrepreneur who's got his eyes on Cal's family's farm may be at the root of the problem. Stopping him could save Congroo and the dragons, and it also might save the farm. Unrelated to the similarly titled What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World (2013), this is a good choice for fans of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Westing Game and Chris Grabenstein's Mr. Lemoncello books. While there's plenty of slapstick, the physical comedy is surrounded by wordplay, a good balance of sophisticated and silly. Subtle jabs at climate change deniers and unqualified wannabe world leaders add layers to Clark's newest. Cal presents white; Drew and Modesty both have brown skin.A smart kid's goofball adventure. (Fantasy. 8-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Preteens from a world where science is an everyday thing and magic the stuff of fantasy (i.e., ours) find themselves tasked with saving a parallel one where the exact opposite is true. Though the spells that the aspirationally named Modesty finds in a mysterious notebook only work for select minutes each day and bear disappointingly mundane titles like "To Gather Lost Coins" and "To Open a Door," they turn out to be surprisingly useful: she and classmates Calvin and Drew open a portal in her refrigerator to wintry Congroo, which is threatened by catastrophe because something is rapidly draining the raw magic that powers its weather and other spells. Worse yet, the dragons that produce said magic are starving to death because the cold has killed their food. The leak turns out to be embedded by a Congroo schemer in his programming for a fantastically popular 3D printer that transforms tomato juice into fresh vegetables. Perhaps the printer's inventor can be persuaded to give up his multibillion-dollar business? Right. Tongue firmly in cheek, Clark propels his squabbling eco-crusaders through a rush of misadventures that test their credibility as well as ingenuity on the way to a confrontation with an oddly familiar villain who loudly dismisses the climate change as "fake news." Another romp from the author of What We Found in the Sofa and How it Saved the World (2013).