Three weeks to harvest. One broken pump. A six-week wait for the part.
Prairie Bend is in the worst drought in a decade, and the town's last working well pump has just seized up. The replacement is six weeks out by mail order. The fields cannot wait that long.
Ten-year-old Wren Castellan is certain she can build a pump out of junkyard scrap. Her dad is just as certain she cannot, and he has a flooded tool shed to prove his point. So Wren recruits Lowell Pruitt, the most careful kid on the road, who agrees to help on exactly one condition: she has to test every single part before she trusts it.
What follows is not one brilliant idea. It is a string of failures, a hand-drawn schematic hidden in a junked truck for decades, and a hard lesson about the difference between the fix that looks impressive and the fix that actually holds.
Three Weeks to Water opens The Junkyard Engineers, a warm, funny series for kids who take things apart to find out how they work, and who would rather be trusted than praised. Perfect for fans of Rosie Revere, Engineer, The Vanderbeekers, and Nate the Great.
The part is six weeks out. The well has nine days.
