The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape by Amy Alznauer & illustrated by Anna Bron

 The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape by Amy Alznauer & illustrated by Anna Bron 

"Writing with a storyteller’s flair, Alznauer captures her audience’s attention with colorful phrases and interesting facts." —Booklist (starred review)

My thoughts:  I love children's picture book biographies as they provide a lovely introduction to children of reading about people who have actually lived and done wonderous things during the lives they lived. Their creativity, their inventiveness, their intelligence, their perseverance. All qualities we want our children to learn and emulate. So reading about Marjorie Rice and her fascination with shapes, is another delightful opportunity to learn about a little known person of real interest.

Geometrical shapes and the math that comes with them elude me personally, and I'm not convinced that Marjorie Rice had any math skills to associate with her fascination with shapes. puzzle tiles, and interconnecting shapes without gaps. But she was drawn to shapes with five sides. This is a bit unusual since Marjorie was a very ordinary woman living a very ordinary life as a wife, housekeeper, and mother of five children. Simply going about her daily life alone is enough to boggle the mind, weary the soul, and tire the body. Perhaps Marjorie's fascination with the elusive five sided shape and tesselation provided a subconscious escape mechanism or distration. Or perhaps she was pure genius. 

I think the book is artistically beautiful, engagin, gand beautifully laid out. The story telling is superb. The ability to understand the concept of polygons and tesselating shapes makes the book upper elementary reading for an audience.

I see this as a terrific book for a library and a terrific book for families that dwell in mathematical mindfulness. I think as a story about an ordinary mother, wife, housewife who thought in unusual areas of math or science while living a busy, hectic, ordinary life it has tremendous value. The story ends with Marjorie being given recognition for her achievements by receiving appreciative accolades at a convention of mathematicians. 

About the book: Ablaze with pattern and color, this ebullient picture book biography celebrates the intersection of art and science—through the life and lens of an extraordinary amateur mathematician.

When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist. Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old “problem of five” (why pentagons don’t fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn’t possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son’s copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn’t she? Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She’d done it! And she’d go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations. In this visually wondrous tribute, Anna Bron’s intricate art teems with patterns, including nods to M. C. Escher, and radiates the thrill of one woman’s discovery, playfully inviting readers to approach geometry through art—and art through geometry. Back matter offers more on the story of five and suggestions on how to discover a shape.

DISCLOSURE: I received a complimentary copy to facilitate a review. Opinions are mine, alone and are freely given.