Thoroughly researched, creatively presented, inspiring real-life role models for girls who love math.
This collective verse biography “honors women who used math to frame and solve problems, fix things, or understand the size of the universe.”
Atkins opens with German Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), the first woman to discover a comet, and closes with American Vera Rubin (1928-2016), an astronomer who proved the existence of dark matter. Throughout, she illustrates how each woman faced personal obstacles as well as gender bias but never allowed “insults or lack of faith to stop” her. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) revolutionized the nursing profession through use of medical statistics, and Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923) became the first female electrical engineer, registering 26 patents; both women were English. American geologist Marie Tharp (1920-2006) helped develop the first map of the entire ocean floor while her countrywoman mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) endured segregation as she calculated trajectories for NASA. At the U.S. Census Bureau, statistician Edna Lee Paisano (1948-2014) used math to “give everyone a fair chance.” With the exception of African American Johnson and Nez Perce Paisano, the women profiled are white. Presented chronologically in engaging verse with a feminist tone, the text artfully weaves scientific data and history with imagined “dialogue and sensory detail based on what’s known about the time, places, and questions” of these remarkable math mavens. A line drawing introduces each woman’s biography, and the “Women Who Widened Horizons” section summarizes their achievements.
Thoroughly researched, creatively presented, inspiring real-life role models for girls who love math. (author’s note, selected bibliography) (Verse biography. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6068-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
A promising debut.
The horrors of the Guatemalan civil war are filtered through the eyes of a boy coming of age.
Set in Chopán in 1981, this verse novel follows the life of Carlos, old enough to feed the chickens but not old enough to wring their necks as the story opens. Carlos’ family and other villagers are introduced in early poems, including Santiago Luc who remembers “a time when there were no soldiers / driving up in jeeps, holding / meetings, making / laws, scattering / bullets into the trees, / hunting guerillas.” On an errand for his mother when soldiers attack, Carlos makes a series of decisions that ultimately save his life but leave him doubting his manliness and bravery. An epilogue of sorts helps tie the main narrative to the present, and the book ends on a hopeful note. In her debut, Brown has chosen an excellent form for exploring the violence and loss of war, but at times, stylistic decisions (most notably attempts at concrete poetry) appear to trump content. While some of the individual poems may be difficult for readers to follow and the frequent references to traditional masculinity may strike some as patriarchal, the use of Spanish is thoughtful, as are references to local flora and fauna. The overall effect is a moving introduction to a subject seldom covered in fiction for youth.
A promising debut. (glossary, author Q&A) (Verse/historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6516-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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