(One can trace with great delight Roberts’s visual inspiration back to those terrific Library of Congress public domain images of women constructing aircrafts in the 1930s and 1940s.)Ĭaptivated by the riveting stories, Rosie decides to build an airplane for her great-great-aunt to fly, then tests her arduously concocted contraption “to see the ridiculous flop it might turn out to be.” One autumn day, Rosie’s oldest relative - her great-great-aunt Rose, “a true dynamo” - comes for a visit and tells the little girl tales of her time building airplanes during WWII. Rosie is a tinkerer - she likes to spend time alone in her attic, making things, making “fine inventions for her aunts and uncles.” In an era when we are finally understanding just how essential failure is to creative breakthroughs yet we are battling a perilous epidemic of mindsets fixed on all-or-nothing success, the message of the book is doubly encouraging and important, beyond the obvious primary motif of defying gender stereotypes. In Rosie Revere, Engineer ( public library), they tell the enormously heartening story of little Rosie - quiet schoolgirl by day, fierce inventor of gizmos by night - who dreams of becoming a bona fide engineer and learns to embrace failure as a vital part of the invention journey. And yet a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, we still settle for the profound failure of imagination that results in less than a third of contemporary children’s books featuring female protagonists, with a solid portion of those purveying limiting gender expectations.įew creators have done more to enrich this impoverished landscape with imaginative alternatives than writer-illustrator duo Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, who also gave us the wonderful celebration of diversity Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau. Mouse, 1981), a same-sex family ( Heather Has Two Mommies, 1989), or a female quantum physicist ( Alice in Quantumland, 1995).

A few decades ago, it was a commendable feat for a children’s book to imagine such stereotype-defying notions as a man who does housework instead of his wife ( Gone Is Gone, 1936), a black woman astronaut ( Blast Off, 1973), a female architect ( Need A House? Call Ms.

Rosie revere engineer book