Skip to main content

Rosie Revere, Engineer



Rosie Revere, Engineer
By Andrea Beaty
Illustrated by David Roberts

Rosie is an imaginative and resourceful young girl with dreams of someday becoming a great engineer. She uses various odds and ends to create contraptions one might not expect, like hot dog dispensers and helium pants. However, she decides to hide her inventions after her favorite uncle laughs at one she designed especially for him. Her inventions remain hidden until Rosie's Great-Great Aunt Rose arrives for an extended stay. Her excitement for engineering re-ignites when Aunt Rose tells her that after all her adventures, “the only thrill left on my list is to fly". In hopes of helping her aunt, Rosie gets to work creating a flying machine. Her first test run fails with only a few second of air time before it comes crashing down. Rosie feels defeated and ready to give up her dream entirely until Aunt Rose helps her realize that her invention wasn't a failure. On the contrary, it was a raging success! The machine did exactly what she intended it to do, it flew. Aunt Rose reminds Rosie that the only true failure is quitting. 

This book celebrates creativity and individuality with rhyming text, a charming mix of watercolor and ink illustrations, and a clever tie to history with a note at the back of the book connecting Aunt Rose to WWII culture icon Rosie the Riveter. The story will no doubt inspire and encourage young readers to peruse their dreams despite what challenges and failures may come their way. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: Fowl Play

  Fowl Play By Kristin O'Donnell Tubb New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. Fiction 277 pages. Still reeling from her beloved uncle's death, Chloe Alvarez is comforted and confused when at his last will and testament reading, Uncle Will gifts her his African Grey parrot, Charlie. Charlie has a robust vocabulary and loves to make Alexa requests for her favorite songs, but when she starts saying things like, "homicide," and "cyanide," Chloe becomes convinced that Uncle Will may have met his demise by murder instead of a genetic disease, as was previously thought. Ultimately, bringing in her brother, Grammy, and Uncle Frank (and of course Charlie,) Chloe's ragtag and adoring family support her search for answers ---going on stakeouts, engaging in fast pursuits, and searching for clues. But as the suspects stack up and the mystery grows, Chole will learn that the process of death and grieving is complicated, and in the end her Uncle Will's words that, ...

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.