JEANNETTE RANKIN

An engrossing profile of a lifelong peace activist who was also the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Coming from Montana, a land of “Big ideas, big promises, big plans,” Rankin first threw herself into working with children and the poor, but then decided that changing inadequate laws would be more effective. Elected in 1916, her congressional career was cut short by her courageous decision to vote against entering the First World War—but that put her on a moral high ground that she never left. She returned to the House just in time to cast a solitary vote against entering the Second World War, and before dying at 92 led a protest against the war in Vietnam too. Though needlessly cast as blank verse, Marx’s robust narrative captures a vivid sense of Rankin’s strong character—which is also picked up in the sepia-toned pencil portraits of a no-nonsense figure with pinned-up hair and an air of confidence that Andreasen intersperses among more impressionistic watercolor illustrations. Rankin is a standard roster entry in collective biographies of women in politics, but this is the first standalone for young readers in more than ten years—and definitely the most memorable. (Biography. 10-12)