Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics

On the fifth day of the competition, Mr. Lemoncello announces that he will play the role of a library patron searching for “a very particular, very special book” (161), and the contestants’ job will be to deduce its title and search for it among the stacks. The first team to find the book will receive the “Thank You” medal. He offers thanks to his acting coach, Sir Donald Thorne, for helping him prepare to play this role. Affecting a friendly Ohio accent, he describes the book in vague terms: It has a female author and is “kind of white and brownish on the front” and “might be about the opposite of wildlife mixed up with a James Joyce novel” (162). He adds that he also recalls something about a fruit unknown before 2014. The teams hurry to nearby tablets to access the library’s book catalog. Miguel explains to his confused team that the clue about fruit refers to the 2014 Newbery Medal, and that this means the book is Flora and Ulysses. When the team searches the library catalog, they find that all the copies in the Children’s Room have been checked out—but there should be one final copy left, in the nearby general fiction shelves.