By Andrea Beaty
A rhyming story about a shy girl who builds wild inventions in secret, until her great-great-aunt teaches her that a flop is just the first try.
Rosie Revere builds marvelous contraptions out of odds and ends, but she does it in secret, up in the attic, because once she made a cheese-powered hat for her uncle and he laughed, and the laugh stung so much she stopped showing anyone. Then her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit, an old woman who built airplanes long ago and has one last dream, to fly. Rosie builds her a flying machine. It sputters up into the air and then crashes straight back down, and Rosie is crushed, until Aunt Rose bursts out laughing with joy, because it flew, just for a moment, and a first flop is not a failure. It's told in the same bouncy Dr.-Seuss-style rhyme as Ada Twist, with David Roberts's wonderful cluttered inventor's drawings on every page.
Some children build and tinker and then quit the second something doesn't work, and this is the book that says the crash is the point, not the end. It reframes failure as the first honest try, which is exactly what a young inventor needs to hear, and it does it in a rhyme so springy you'll be glad to read it again. Rosie is quiet and a little bashful, so shy children see themselves in her, and it sits alongside Ada Twist as part of the Questioneers, so a child who loves one has the others waiting.