By Catherine Thimmesh
Short true stories of women who invented things you use every day, from the chocolate chip cookie to Kevlar.
It's a collection of short profiles, a few pages each, of women and girls who invented something. Ruth Wakefield and the chocolate chip cookie. Mary Anderson, who watched a streetcar driver lean out into the sleet to clear his own windshield and went home and designed the windshield wiper. Stephanie Kwolek and Kevlar, the fiber that goes into bulletproof vests. Bette Nesmith Graham, a typist who got tired of her mistakes and mixed the first batch of Liquid Paper in her kitchen. Melissa Sweet's collage art gives each woman her own scrapbook page, full of cut paper and handwriting. The revised edition drops three of the older chapters and adds seven newer inventions, several by teenagers. Trisha Prabhu built a tool that makes a person stop and reconsider before posting something cruel. Alissa Chavez designed a sensor meant to keep a child from being left behind in a hot car. The back of the book explains how a patent actually works.
Every profile is short and finished, so a child who won't commit to a whole book will still read four pages about the cookie and then four more about Kevlar. It's a book for dipping in and out of, which counts as reading. And Thimmesh keeps the frustration in the story: most of these women invented something because an ordinary thing annoyed them and nobody else had fixed it. That's a more encouraging starting point for a would-be inventor than raw genius. The patent pages at the back are practical enough that a child with an idea of their own can actually use them. The text is on the denser side and there's no plot to pull a struggling reader through, so it lands best with a fluent reader, or read a profile at a time out loud.