Review of The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice, by Amy Alznauer, illustrated by Anna Bron

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice

How to Discover a Shape

by Amy Alznauer
illustrated by Anna Bron

Candlewick Press, 2025. 48 pages.
Review written October 3, 2025, from a book sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review

Like another book I recently reviewed, Firefly Song, The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice is a picture book biography of a citizen scientist, a woman who made a notable discovery, even though she didn’t have formal training in that field. Marjorie Rice now has a special place in my heart, because in her case, the field was math.

The biography tells us how Marjorie Rice read an article in Scientific American by Martin Gardner and then got captivated with the idea of finding more five-sided convex shapes that tile a plane. And the stellar art by Anna Bron helps make it clear to the reader what this means.

We learn how she was inspired when a new tiling was discovered – to then search for new five-sided shapes of her own that would work. And she went on to find four of fifteen pentagon types that tile the plane. (Years later, other mathematicians found two more, and then another proved that there were no more.)

This amateur mathematician’s life is especially suited for a picture book biography because her work was so visual – and the artist did a great job of using pentagon tilings throughout the book. Back matter not only tells about the pentagon discoveries after Marjorie, they also give the reader great ideas for exploring shapes, tilings, and tessellations further.

I love that this is the story of a housewife with a curious and playful mind (if perhaps a somewhat obsessive one).

Oh look! I’m ready to post this review and looked up the author’s website. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and also teaches calculus and number theory. This makes me feel like she’s a kindred spirit with me, since I have Master’s degrees in Mathematics and in Library Science – not a typical combination. This explains her excellent picture book biographies of mathematicians. I’m going to keep watching for her books.

amyalz.com
candlewick.com

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Review of Zero! The Number That Almost Wasn’t, by Sarah Albee, illustrated by Chris Hsu

Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

Zero!

The Number That Almost Wasn’t

by Sarah Albee
illustrated by Chris Hsu

Charlesbridge, 2025. 40 pages.
Review written July 11, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

Fun fact: When Europeans set up the calendar we use today, they did not include a Year Zero. The year after 1 BC was 1 AD. Of course, they were given these names long, long after they happened. But because Europeans didn’t understand zero when they developed the calendar – the Twenty-first Century didn’t actually start until the year 2001. I tried to wrote a short article about this and tried to sell it to children’s magazines in 1999 and 2000, with no success. And I have to admit that switching from 1999 to 2000 feels much more momentous than switching from 2000 to 2001, even if it wasn’t actually the new century yet.

Anyway, all my thinking about when the century started sprang from the moment I learned that Europeans didn’t adopt the symbol zero or even the concept of zero until well past the Middle Ages – and that’s what this book is about.

This picture book explains the history of Zero in a way children can understand. (Yes, without touching on questions of what that means about the start of centuries.) It talks briefly about the concept of Nothing and the concept of Place Value, but it’s mostly about the history of writing numbers.

We hear about the Babylonians – who did use a place value and a mark for an “empty” place. We hear about the Greeks, who were especially strong in astronomy and geometry. The Mayans developed zero earlier than anyone else – but their knowledge was lost when Spanish invaders destroyed their records. Roman numerals came along next, which was difficult for doing complex calculations. But during the Dark Ages in Europe, mathematics thrived in India, where an unknown mathematician invented a symbol for zero.

The concept of zero spread to Baghdad, the center of the Muslim Empire – and writings from Arabic mathematicians took advantage of the concept, developing the field of Algebra.

The book chronicles all this, plus how long it took Europeans to adopt the concept. Sadly, some Christians were even then opposed to an advance of knowledge:

A few Christian leaders actually banished zero. They argued that God had created everything, so something that represented nothing must be the work of the devil.

Finally, the invention of the printing press helped the Hindu-Arabic number system spread as people came to appreciate how much it facilitates doing mathematics.

All that is present in this picture book, with engaging cartoon illustrations. There are even notes at the back about historical details present in the illustrations.

Those who read this book will get a grasp on the mind-blowing fact that Zero had to be invented, and was actually invented much later than you’d think it was. You’ll never take Nothing for granted again.

sarahalbeebooks.com
chrishsu.net

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Review of Beyond the Limit, by Joan Spicci

Fiction Review, Mathematical, Sonderbooks25, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Beyond the Limit

The Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya

by Joan Spicci

Tom Doherty Associates (Forge), 2002. 490 pages.
Review written June 8, 2025, from my own copy.
Originial review written September 1, 2003.
Starred Review

I’m celebrating my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks with #Sonderbooks25. My plan was to reread one book from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs and post about the process. Well, things got complicated because I couldn’t confine myself to that – but the fact remains that Beyond the Limit was the one book I chose from my 2003 Sonderbooks Stand-outs to reread. And I’m writing a new review, not because that one isn’t still valid, but to include a blog post and have a review in the new phone-friendly format, while reflecting on the book after a reread.

This is still my absolutely favorite novel about a mathematician. Okay, I haven’t read a lot of novels about mathematicians – but it’s still the book I bring up any time anyone asks about mathematical books for adults, and it’s always been included on my Sondermath page.

The crazy thing about this historical novel is that it’s all true. Joan Spicci learned Russian and translated books and letters by Sofya Kovalevskaya before writing this book – and then she put what she learned into a novel. And okay, it’s not a work of nonfiction and we can’t promise she got everybody’s motivations and words correct – but oh my goodness, it’s a compelling story. And checking the Wikipedia page suggests that all the big dramatic events of the story actually happened.

The story tells the quest of Sofya Kovalevskaya to be the first woman to get a doctorate in Math. She was born in 1850, and the book begins with her a teen in Russia, studying with tutors, but not allowed to go to university at all in Russia. And she can’t leave the country without permission from her father or a husband. So her sister and a group of friends start looking for a man who will enter into a fictitious marriage with one of them, intending to sponsor the other friends as well. They find Vladimir Kovalevsky, and he agrees to enter into such a marriage with Sofya – but realizing that a fictitious marriage was considered criminal sacrilege in Russia at the time. Vladimir himself was a scientist and a publisher, having published Darwin’s books in Russian.

And then the novel shows Sofya and Vladimir falling in love. But she doesn’t dare live as his actual wife, because if she were to get pregnant, that would end any chance for studying at a university. And she faces all kinds of prejudice anyway, eventually finding a mentor who has to tutor her privately in her PhD work.

But along the way, the historical backdrop is amazing. She goes with Vladimir to London and meets Darwin and his wife. And later, her sister gets involved in the Paris commune portrayed in Victor Hugo’s work, and Sofya herself gets involved working in the hospital in besieged Paris – and her sister and her husband get arrested. This was another thing that, if it were known, could have ended her academic career.

On this second reading, I got pretty annoyed with her sister. She scorned any idea of Sofya falling in love with Vladimir – and then later married a man for love herself. But the whole novel shows us Sofya trying to please her sister, no matter how her sister treats her.

The whole story is gripping and makes me appreciate my own education much more fully – and gets you cheering for Sofya and the many obstacles she faced simply to get to exercise her brilliant mind and do mathematics. I still highly recommend this amazing historical novel.

joanspicci.com

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Review of My Mechanical Romance, by Alexene Farol Follmuth

Contemporary, Mathematical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

My Mechanical Romance

by Alexene Farol Follmuth
read by Amielynn Abellera and Christopher Salazar

Recorded Books, 2022. 8 hours, 46 minutes.
Review written December 14, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2024 Mathical Book Prize Honor Book, ages 14-18

My Mechanical Romance is a super fun high school romance tale about a new girl named Bel who turns out to be good at robotics. After her thrown-together egg drop project is the best performer of her class, her teacher says her grade won’t get docked if she tries out for the robotics team and joins AP Physics.

Teo is captain of the robotics team and captain of the soccer team, too. He begrudgingly allowed auditions for the team, even though they already have enough seniors. When Bel wows them with an again thrown-together project, she gets a spot on the team, even though the only other girl on the team doesn’t think she knows what she’s doing.

Bel and Teo start getting to know one another in a lovely slow-burn romance. Bel’s switched schools her senior year because of her parents’ divorce. Teo’s dad is a high-powered software developer, and Teo takes for granted the weight of their expectations.

I did not like the voice the narrator used for Bel’s best friend, a Valley girl accent. But since the book takes place in the San Fernando Valley, where that accent came from, I probably shouldn’t complain.

I loved the portrayal of what women in STEM are up against. I didn’t like, though, that a couple times Bel called herself “not a math person.” Usually I’d think math and robotics go together, and Bel’s taking Calculus, so I wish she’d gotten a little pushback for that. Bel’s portrayed as learning about robotics from tinkering with machines in her dad’s workshop and building and welding things since she was small, so it’s more of an intuitive sense of mechanics. Not to give spoilers, but I loved the way the book ended, too, and the portrayal of adjusting future plans with an epilogue set two years later.

I listened to this book on a Sick Day when I was getting obsessive about a jigsaw puzzle and listened to the whole thing in one day. Completely delightful. And go, women in STEM!

alexenefarolfollmuth.com

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Review of Violet and the Pie of Life, by Debra Green

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

Violet and the Pie of Life

by Debra Green

Holiday House, 2021. 279 pages.
Review written December 13, 2023, from a library book.
Starred review
2024 Mathical Honor Book, Ages 11-13

When Violet’s best friend Mackenzie wants to try out for their middle school’s production of The Wizard of Oz, Violet only joins in because it would be fun to go to rehearsals with Mackenzie. Never mind that Ally, the popular girl Mackenzie says is terrible, does a wonderful audition for Dorothy.

But when Violet gets the part of the Cowardly Lion, and Mackenzie gets the part of a flying monkey, Violet has to decide if she’ll stick with it when her friend quits. And would it be disloyal to be friends with Ally, who really doesn’t seem so bad?

Meanwhile, while Violet’s navigating all this friendship stuff, her parents fight and her Dad moves out. And doesn’t answer her emails. Maybe now she has a part in the play, she can get both her parents to come and remember how much they love each other.

Through all of this, Violet looks to math as something she can count on. The pages of this book are filled with charts she makes, laying out the problems of her life like math problems — from a chart of the intensity of her parents’ fights to flow charts of her plans to email her Dad. I especially liked when her affinity for math helped her quickly understand how much commission her realtor Mom would make after selling a home in Laguna Beach.

This kids’ novel is no math text book, but it’s math-friendly, featuring a middle school kid with relatable problems who thinks in mathematical ways.

HolidayHouse.com

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Review of Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou

Graphic Novel, Mathematical, Nonfiction Review 0

Logicomix

An Epic Search for Truth

by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

Bloomsbury, 2009. 344 pages.
Review written May 12, 2025, from a library book.

Logicomix is a graphic novel fictionalized biography of Bertram Russell – but complete with a detailed explanation of the quest for a logically consistent foundation of mathematics – culminating in Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

As an undergraduate math major and a graduate student in math, I had a general idea of all this, and reading it now, I appreciated the specifics and the introduction to the people (all white men) who worked on those foundations. Something about having it all laid out in a graphic novel helped me understand the people and their quest and the interactions.

The story isn’t necessarily a pretty one. Russell had four wives, and the first one was given a “rest cure” after she realized he was falling in love with his best friend’s wife. I’m not sure I appreciated all the talk of mathematicians, or at least logicians, being prone to insanity, nor the dismissal of the children of logicians who had schizophrenia. But these were real people’s lives and that shows they didn’t clean it up for the twenty-first century.

So I do think those who will find the book most interesting are those who are interested in the quest for a provable foundation of mathematics – and how that quest was stymied. But I am one of those people, and I enjoyed this book.

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Review of 365: How to Count a Year, by Miranda Paul & Julien Chung

Children's Nonfiction Review, Contemporary, Delightfully Silly, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

365

How to Count a Year

by Miranda Paul & Julien Chung

Beach Lane Books, 2023. 44 pages.
Review written October 26, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

365 is a wonderful kid-friendly picture book about different units of time and how many of them make up a year. It’s bright and colorful and gives examples that will make kids laugh.

The start is basic:

It takes the Earth 365 days to spin around the sun.

But the book quickly gets more creative:

That’s 365 “Good mornings,”

365 “Good nights,”

and, hopefully, 365 clean pairs of underwear.

Then it goes on to talk about things that might happen 52 times in the 52 weeks of a year.

And next are groups of 12 things that happen monthly. Like cleaning the fish tank or getting a magazine.

And if 365, 52, and 12 are too big for you, it all comes back to 1 year, which, of course, is best measured in birthdays.

But that’s not all!

And right after that party is over,
you’ll probably start asking …

how long until next year’s celebration?

The answer —
8,760 hours —
might seem like forever.

And then they go on to minutes and seconds in a year.

A spread at the end tells us:

But the good news is that you can group those
seconds into minutes and minutes into hours and hours into sunsets and sunrises and good mornings and good nights and clean (or dirty) underwear, flavors of the day, Friday night spills, or Saturday sleep-ins, so the countdown simply becomes…

1 marvelous collage of 1 year in the life of you.

How will you count your year?

It’s all colorful and fun and directly relates the somewhat abstract concept of time to kids’ lives. There’s a bonus page at the back telling how much time or how many times certain things happen in a year.

A beautiful introduction to the mathematics of time for young children.

mirandapaul.com
julienchung.com

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Review of Patterns Everywhere, by Lisa Varchol Perron

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Science, Starred Review 0

Patterns Everywhere

by Lisa Varchol Perron

Millbrook Press, 2023. 32 pages.
Review written November 22, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

Patterns Everywhere is a beautiful nonfiction book for primary-grade kids that will get them noticing many kinds of patterns in nature.

Each spread is dominated by a large photograph of something in nature, a simple rhyme about it with the rhyme scheme AABB (another pattern!) and a factual paragraph with more detail. It’s attractively presented and shows a wide variety of things. Here’s the introductory first spread:

Step outside. Let’s find designs —
branching, cracking, spirals, lines.
Search the earth, the seas, the air.
Patterns, patterns everywhere.

WHAT IS A PATTERN?
A pattern is a sequence that repeats in a predictable way. Nature is full of them! Some of nature’s patterns are made of repeating geometric shapes. Other patterns are created by color or spacing.

The spreads after that show leaf veins, ridges and valleys, sand dunes, meandering rivers, corals, wave ripples, sea foam, layered earth, basalt columns, snowflakes, mud cracks, and spiral plants and animals. There are two pages of more information at the back, including some activities.

This is a simple introduction to patterns, attractively presented, and will open kids eyes to the patterns around them.

lisaperronbooks.com
lernerbooks.com

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Review of Friend of Numbers, by Priya Narayanan, illustrated by Satwik Gade

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

Friend of Numbers

The Life of Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan

written by Priya Narayanan
illustrated by Satwik Gade

Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2023. First Published in India in 2019. 36 pages.
Review written November 17, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review
2024 Mathical Book Prize Winner, ages 8-10

I’ve already read a wonderful picture book biography of the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but this one is special because it was written by an Indian for children of India.

This one is also geared a little younger, making Ramanujan’s ideas understandable to kids by presenting them as patterns only he could see.

It talks about his childhood in India and how he didn’t fit in, and then the changes he had to make to his hair and clothes to move to England to work on mathematics. It tells some stories about Ramanujan that are legendary among mathematicians, like this one:

Another day, Professor Hardy happened to mention that the taxi he had just come in had quite a boring number — 1729.

“No! It is a very interesting number,” Ramanujan shot back. His sharp memory drew out something he’d read about long ago, and on a piece of paper he scribbled:

1729 = (12 x 12 x 12) + (1 x 1 x 1)
1729 = (10 x 10 x 10) + (9 x 9 x 9)

“Look at the pattern!” he exclaimed.

Numbers were his friends. He could remember special things about them, the way that one remembers a friend’s birthday.

There are eight pages of notes at the back, including some ideas for readers to explore further. (Make a magic square using your birth date!)

A delightful introduction for kids to the life of this great man.

priyanarayanan.in

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Review of The Power of Snow, by Bob Raczka, illustrated by Bryony Clarkson

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

The Power of Snow

by Bob Raczka
illustrated by Bryony Clarkson

Millbrook Press, 2023. 36 pages.
Review written November 9, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

This book is a very simple picture book that demonstrates exponents with snowflakes — on each page, the number of snowflakes doubles.

The main text is simple rhymes. The first few spreads go like this:

Two flakes play.

Four flakes sashay.

Eight flakes twirl.

Sixteen flakes swirl.

On the opposite page from the main text, we’ve got the number of snowflakes expressed with numerals and equations, like this:

27 = 2 to the seventh power

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 128

The scenes behind the snowflakes look like suburban backyards, with at least one animal visitor on each page.

The most wonderful thing about this book is that the illustrator worked to get exactly the right number of snowflakes on each page. Here’s what she says in a note at the back:

Creating the art for The Power of Snow presented one tricky problem: how to show the correct number of snowflakes on each page. For this book, it was important to get the math right! Of course, the first few pages were easy. But as the quantity of flakes increased, it became much harder to count them all. So I worked out a plan. The images were created using different layers, kind of like clear sheets with different parts of the art on each one. I created a certain number of flakes on one layer. Then I duplicated this layer, flipping, scaling, and rotating it to give a natural look. Duplicating the layer allowed me to multiply the exact number of flakes as I worked. I could then add the more detailed snowflakes, counting these out individually to get to the total number. As with real snow, once the flakes became tiny and overlaid, some appear to blend together — but they are all there!

The effect is that you won’t be able to count all 16,384 flakes on the page for 214, but you can definitely get the idea.

Okay, my first reaction to this book is that it’s for a young reader — primary grades or even preschoolers who haven’t learned to multiply yet, so why are they illustrating exponents to such young readers? I do wish the word “doubled” was used, instead of relying on the multiplication notation.

But then I think about the things I showed my own kids when they were young, and I’m sure that kids exposed to this book will have an easier time understanding exponents later. In fact, hmmm, this might be a wonderful gift for my four-year-old nephew who has two big sisters. When they read it to him, they will pick up the ideas… and he will think exponents are the most natural thing in the world when it finally comes time to learn about them in school.

Yeah, I think I’m won over. Doubling before your eyes!

bobraczka.com
bryonyclarkson.com
lernerbooks.com

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