GOLDIE BLOX RULES THE SCHOOL!

GoldieBlox, the internet’s favorite girls-and-engineering toy, expands into chapter books.

After an unfortunate incident involving launching the second floor of Goldie’s old school into orbit—the Blox School, where the white girl’s mother teaches a handful of students—results in the school’s closure, Goldie’s sent to the prestigious Higgs Bozon Prep. Despite the company of her best friend, Li Zhang, a Chinese-American boy who loves physics and skateboarding, HiBo’s rigid rules and conventional conformity are no fit for a wild, creative inventor like Goldie. So she rounds up a team of potential allies: those who want to purge her zaniness from the school (black coder and fashionista Ruby Rails; purple-haired, brown-skinned, shy musician Val; and white, snobby Zeek Zander, the mayor’s son, who excels at spending money and math). Through working together in the rebuild (and catching the mayor in a net to force him to listen to their arguments about why the Blox School must reopen), Goldie builds strong friendships with Ruby and Val, who decide that the inventive, fun chaos that disorganized, impulsive Goldie brings makes it worth having her around. There isn’t much in the way of STEM content in this series opener, a proliferation of gadgets notwithstanding, but that may come in time, and the affirmation of the role of the imagination in tech is a welcome one.

Light on actual science but big on creativity.