The Blossoms and the Green Phantom » (Reissue)

Betsy Byars, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, received a degree in English from Queens College there. Currently, she lives in Clemson, SC with her husband, a college professor. They have four grown children--one son and three daughters--and five grandchildren. "My own hobbies," Byars says, "are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals. But my husband has some very interesting hobbies, and through him, I've learned to fly and earned my pilot's license. Together, we fly all over the United States. Since our children are all grown now, we also travel a great deal in Europe, but we take commercial flights because our plane is not really equipped to make transatlantic flights."

Junior Blossom has finally created the ultimate invention--the Green Phantom. It's big, black, Day-Glo green, and it's beautiful! All it needs is the secret ingredient.



The whole family makes a promise to ensure that Junior's invention will be a success, a Blossom promise that can never be broken.



Family and friends gather to launch the Green Phantom, but where are Pap and his dog, Mud? They wouldn't break a Blossom promise unless they were in serious trouble....

Children's Literature

Holiday House is reissuing Betsy Byars' "Blossom Family" series. In this third title, Junior is in tears over the failure of his most glorious invention yet, the Green Phantom, a flying saucer cobbled together with tape and wire from garbage bags and air mattresses painted Day-Glo green. Junior yearns to hear his mother say the words she has just said to his rodeo-riding sister Maggie: "your [dead] dad would be so proud of you." In true Blossom family fashion, the whole family rallies around Junior to help make the Green Phantom into "the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most spectacular UFO the world has ever seen." Well, except for Paps, who has fallen into a Dumpster to rescue an abandoned puppy, and Paps' dog Mud, who will not stop howling, and Maggie and Vern and Maggie's friend Ralphie and Vern's friend Michael, who leave Junior behind when the first launch of the Phantom leaves him stuck on the roof of mean, gun-toting, old man Benson's chicken coop. As always, Byars gives a kaleidoscope of points of view, entering with equal skill into the mind of an elderly man, a lovesick boy, a thwarted inventor, and a sulking dog. As always, humor and heartbreak are never far apart, and readers cry through their laughter and smile through their tears. In her body of work, Byars has produced some of the "the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most spectacular" middle grade fiction the world of children's literature has ever seen. Includes a reader's guide. Reviewer: Claudia Mills, Ph.D.