Review of The Woman in the Moon, by Richard Maurer

Biography, Mathematical, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

The Woman in the Moon

How Margaret Hamilton Helped Fly the First Astronauts to the Moon

by Richard Maurer

Roaring Brook Press, 2023. 254 pages.
Review written December 15, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

It’s always good to read about a female mathematician who excelled in her field. Margaret Hamilton studied math in the 1950s and learned computer programming while working with the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered the Butterfly Effect in meteorology. Margaret ran his computer simulations at MIT, and later moved to the lab that worked on the computer software that would go into space with the Apollo missions. Margaret, in fact, was the person who coined the term “software engineering” to reflect that writing the computer code was as much a feat of engineering as constructing the wiring – though in fact some of that code was wired into the physical computers.

This book takes us through Margaret’s life as she was consistently the only woman in her field. It goes into lots of interesting detail about the Apollo missions, all that they were up against, and how Margaret was responsible for making the software work. An abundance of relevant photos help keep the text moving, and the whole thing captures the sense of wonder that humans actually made it to the moon – with 1960s technology.

Historians believe a key reason that American astronauts got to the Moon first (Soviet space travelers never got there at all) was America’s lead in computer technology. There were computers at the launch center, computers at Mission Control, computers at the contractors, computers at the tracking stations, and of course the miniature AGC in the spacecraft. Among all these electronic brains, the only computer that never failed was the AGC. In thousands of hours of manned spaceflight, no software errors were known to have occurred. The achievement is unique in computer history. “Nobody can believe it to this day,” Margaret noted.

Margaret was the one in charge of the software for the AGC, the Apollo Guidance Computer, which was in the command modules in flight. This was a behind-the-scenes job, so it’s good to see this entire book about her, giving some much deserved recognition (besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom she got in 2016). Now kids and teens can learn about her accomplishments.

This book is geared to a middle school audience, but there’s nothing in it that would make high school students feel it’s too young for them, so I decided to post this review on my Teen Nonfiction page instead of my Children’s Nonfiction page, even though in the library we have it as a Juvenile Biography. It’s at a much higher level than the many picture book biographies I post on that page. aLearn about the woman who wrote the software that got humans to the moon.

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Review of A Dangerous Idea, by Debbie Levy

History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

A Dangerous Idea

The Scopes Trial, the Original Fight over Science in Schools

by Debbie Levy

Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2025. 278 pages.
Review written October 8, 2025, from a copy I was given at ALA Annual Conference, signed by the author
Starred Review

Lest we think that controlling what kids are taught is a new idea, A Dangerous Idea lays out for teens the media circus that happened in 1925 over a few lines about evolution in a high school biology textbook.

Debbie Levy lays out the whole case from roots to verdict and aftermath. She gives us the background of the two big-shot lawyers who faced each other in the Scopes trial. John Scopes was simply a young high school biology teacher who agreed to be a test case after Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The real media attention came because of the lawyers – William Jennings Bryan, who had run for president three times and drew huge crowds on the lecture circuit, versus Clarence Darrow, who had publicly challenged Bryan already and had taken famous cases trying to bring down the death penalty.

Although I’d heard of the case, (Of course I had!) I’d had no idea how much was involved and how huge it was in the attention of the entire country – even in the days before television. Thousands of journalists descended on the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, and spread the word about the trial.

So Debbie Levy is able to bring us a multitude of photographs from the time and newspaper clippings and editorial cartoons, and plenty of other material to illustrate the story and help it come alive. It turns out the jury didn’t even hear most of the trial, because much of it was the argument that evolution isn’t actually contrary to Scripture – but the judge ruled all that mattered was if the law was broken.

I do like the way the author connects the dots between the Scopes trial and backlash against science today. This is from the Epilogue:

Today, complaints about science in the classroom go well beyond evolution. Some parents and lawmakers don’t want schools to teach about climate change. They don’t want laws and policies to address climate change, either, because they think it’s a hoax or not caused by human activity. This is contrary to scientific evidence. Cimate-change deniers found a friend in the White House in President Donald Trump. “I don’t believe it,” he said in 2018. “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers” in climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020, also spurred epic resistance to science among large swaths of the American public and their leaders. When leading scientists – the preeminent experts on infectious and viral diseases – tried to guide the public on how to protect themselves from the novel coronavirus, President Trump called them “idiots.”

And so, hgere are two persistent threads lifted from the pattern woven a century ago. First: ridicule. Anti-evolutionists at the time of the Scopes trial made fun of scientists because, as Will Bryan scoffed, “They cannot agree with each other.” Will’s mockery was a cheap shot – just as it was a cheap shot, a century later, to mock scientists for altering their advice, in response to new and evolving discoveries, on how to protect against getting sick or dying from the coronavirus. That is what happens in science as a result of ongoing observation, experimentation, and, yes, disagreement among scientists: knowledge evolves.

And second: lumping together science and belief, by couching science as something you “believe” in, or not. Forcing, or even strongly urging, people to “believe” in a creed (science) that doesn’t appeal to them – that’s a bad thing to do, isn’t it? It’s un-American, isn’t it? But science isn’t a religious creed. And religion isn’t science.

I like that this book is aimed at teens – exactly the age of people the original Tennessee law was trying to protect. Give them the full story – and we may find teens are more discerning than adults think they are.

debbielevybooks.com
bloomsbury.com

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Review of Death in the Jungle, by Candace Fleming

Audiobooks, History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Death in the Jungle

Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown

by Candace Fleming
read by Karen Murray

Listening Library, 2025. 9 hours, 47 minutes.
Review written September 8, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I checked out this eaudiobook, not because I was interested in Jim Jones, but because everything Candace Fleming writes is fascinating. This book was no exception. It was not pleasant listening, but once I got started, I couldn’t look away.

This book tells the whole story of Jim Jones and Jonestown – and the murders and suicides of over 900 people. (Yes, murder. Some people did not drink the poison, but were injected with it.)

Knowing basically how the story ends, it was horrible to watch it unfold, but fascinating. By necessity, the author got her information from interviews with survivors and survivor accounts, so the main folks whose perspective we got to hear from were people who survived, which made the story a little less gut-wrenching.

I was a teen when the Jonestown tragedy happened, so I didn’t know a lot of the details. I didn’t even realize that Jim Jones ordered the assassination of a congressman who was investigating the commune in Guyana – and his assassination spurred the other deaths, as the people had been told the American government wanted to destroy them.

But I also hadn’t known how the People’s Temple started – with good works and social work against poverty and racism in the 1960s. The People’s Temple had a mix of Blacks and whites when other American churches excluded minorities. It was hard to hear what good things they started with, putting other churches to shame.

But clearly, from the beginning, Jim Jones was after power and manipulation. He faked faith healings to build followers. Later, after he had people under his sway, he repudiated the Bible and Christianity – it had been all part of his show.

And things got worse and worse as Jim Jones gained power over people. He was also addicted to various drugs and not at all healthy, mentally or physically. Once he got his followers to Guyana, where he could keep them from escaping, he could control their lives in every way. Perhaps that’s why the congressman’s visit – and the fact that some people tried to leave with him – was so threatening.

The book is sobering, because yes, the good works the church did at the beginning would have gained my admiration. I also began to understand how hard it was to leave once you were plugged in. And Jim Jones’ power to gain a devoted following? People who are willing to lie and manipulate can gain all kinds of power that’s hard to shake. Dare I say that this reminded me of our current president?

So it’s not like this book is pleasant reading. But it tells the full story of a dark incident in our history. And maybe it will help teens think twice about promises from a charismatic leader. Pair it with the book Cultish for insights on how to tell if a tight-knit community is good for you or is destructive.

candacefleming.com

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Review of The Woman Who Split the Atom, by Marissa Moss

Biography, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

The Woman Who Split the Atom

The Life of Lise Meitner

by Marissa Moss

Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2022. 264 pages.
Review written January 8, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Mathical Award Honor Book, Grades 6-8

I read this book specifically to consider for the Mathical Book Prize (so I’ll wait to post this review until after our winners are announced) – and I put off reading it because the cover didn’t grab me. Oh my goodness, I was completely unprepared for how gripping this true story is!

It’s the story of Lise Meitner, a woman who loved nothing more than doing physics – at a time when women had to fight to be allowed to do science at all. She was Austrian, and one of the few women to attend the University of Vienna in 1901. She went on to become only the second woman to get a PhD there, and the first in Physics. But her next battle was finding a place that would hire her – or even let her work in a lab for free. That’s what she ended up doing in Berlin, still publishing scientific papers and doing translation work, until she finally got a small salary at the newly opened Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

Meitner did most of her work collaborating with Otto Hahn, a chemist. He would do the chemistry part, and she would tackle the physics, as they worked with radioactivity and transuranic elements. Even though there was always a tendency for her contribution to be ignored because she was a woman, she was happy to have the chance to work. This was all interrupted by World War I. Meitner unhappily went to work with x-rays on the front with the Austrian army, while Hahn developed chemical weapons for Germany.

After the war, Meitner happily went back to work with what she cared about most – doing physics. But as Hitler rose to power, more and more backlash developed against Jews. Meitner was a Jew, but had been baptized as an adult, and didn’t practice any religion. She didn’t give the Nazis lots of thought. “She never once considered leaving her home over stupid politics.”

It was interesting reading this section the same time I was listening to the audiobook of In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, about the rise of Hitler. I hadn’t realized this all started in 1933. Meitner kept right on ignoring the situation, and finally just barely made it out of Germany – without her equipment – in 1938. She again had trouble finding a place to work, but did some work in Stockholm, near her nephew Robert Frisch. He worked together with Meitner as she looked over the strange results of Hahn’s experiments that he had sent to her, telling her he was going to publish as a failure.

Well, Meitner and Frisch took a closer look, did the math, and realized that the uranium atom was splitting and giving off energy. But even though she wrote up her thinking – Hahn ended up getting the credit.

But then came the debate about whether this energy could be harnessed in a bomb. Meitner was in the middle – hiding from German scientists what allied scientists were figuring out might be possible. But she only wanted this work harnessed for peaceful purposes, and when she was asked to join the Manhattan Project, she refused. Years later, when a reporter called her “the Mother of the Bomb,” that made her cry. And she worked all her life for peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

That summary just gives an idea of all the big parts of history this woman lived through and how much she had to struggle to even get to do her work, let alone get any credit for it. Each one of the 39 short chapters has a one-page cartoon dramatizing an event to lead off that chapter, and it does help pull the reader along. I had thought reading this book would be a chore, but it turned out to be hard to put down, and when I did manage to put it down, I kept thinking about it and eagerly went back to it.

[As for Mathical: At this point I don’t know what the committee will decide. If this book does not become an honor book, it’s not for any lack in the story. But something our committee always has to grapple with is this: Is it Mathematical enough? Lise Meitner was a physicist, not a mathematician, but it was her mastery of math that was fundamental in her calculations that the uranium atom had split. So we’ll see what the committee decides….] [And obviously, it did decide to include this book.]

One more note before I post: Although this book is listed as a juvenile biography, it’s also listed as for ages 11 to 15. I’m going to start listing books for upper elementary and middle school on my Teen Nonfiction page, to help them stand out from the many nonfiction picture books that dominate my Children’s Nonfiction page. So this is going to be a book on the younger end of Teen Nonfiction rather than the older end of Children’s Nonfiction. And teens will certainly enjoy it, too. A story of a woman overcoming all kinds of obstacles and prejudice and changing the world.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Black Girl, You Are Atlas, by Renée Watson, fine art by Ekua Holmes, read by Renée Watson

Audiobooks, Biography, Poetry, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Black Girl, You Are Atlas

by Renée Watson
fine art by Ekua Holmes
read by Renée Watson

Kokila, 2024. 81 pages.
Listening Library, 2024. 52 minutes.
Review written February 10, 2025, from a library book and eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
2025 Odyssey Honor Audiobook
2025 Rise List Top Ten
2025 Cybils Winner, Poetry Collection

Black Girl, You Are Atlas is a book of poetry about growing up as a Black girl, as a sister, a daughter, and a Black girl seeing how the world around her treats Black girls.

The title poem refers to the Greek hero Atlas who held the weight of the world. But it also talks about an atlas that shows the way forward and the way back. It expresses all that a Black girl carries.

Other poems talk about turning 7, turning 13, turning 16, and turning 17, about being a sister, about surviving the teenage years. And about holding onto happiness.

Both the audio and the print versions of this book are exquisite. I always listen to every Odyssey Honor audiobook I can get my hands on. This one is read by the author and expresses her powerful words. The print version, on the other hand, has Ekua Holmes amazing art accompanying it. Both versions are short, so there’s no reason not to enjoy this book both ways.

As a white woman, I did appreciate these poems – but get them into the hands of every Black teenage girl you know. There are powerful words in this book.

reneewatson.net
ekuaholmes.com

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Review of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, by Tony Keith Jr.

Audiobooks, Biography, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

How the Boogeyman Became a Poet

by Tony Keith Jr.
performed by the Author

Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. 5 hours, 4 minutes.
Review written February 4, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 Odyssey Award Winner, Young Adult

I try to listen to all Odyssey Award winners and honor books, because they’re specifically given for the best audiobooks, and the quality is always outstanding. This book was no exception.

How the Boogeyman Became a Poet is a memoir from a Black poet and spoken word artist about his years in high school and starting college when he was coming to terms in his own heart and mind with being gay.

And he tells the story himself, with many poems included and performed. There are sound effects adding to the production, and this is a powerful audiobook.

The story starts his senior year of high school. He’s missed deadlines to apply to college and is taking the SAT for the third time, but gets a chance to apply. He’s got a girlfriend, but somehow is never in the mood to “do business” with her, and he doesn’t dare tell anyone that he thinks he might be gay – that fear is a boogeyman that he sees in the mirror and hiding in his closet – but he works out a lot of his thinking and feeling by writing poems and playing with language.

He was known as a poet in high school, writing love poems for his friends to give to their girlfriends on Valentine’s Day to make a little money, and performing in the student talent show. In college, he found that open mic nights with all their acceptance were better for him than competitive poetry slams. But always, poetry was where he turned with his feelings that he didn’t always understand.

I think my favorite poem was about the joy he got out of singing in youth choir. Yes! It’s a lovely expression of what singing in a choir can be. Unfortunately, it was also at church that he was taught that being gay would send him to hell, and why he resisted so hard admitting what was going on inside.

This book is a true coming-of-age story, told in an award-winning audio package. When I looked up the author’s website, I was delighted to learn that he went on to earn a PhD. Not bad for the first person in his family to go to college! Listeners are honored to get to share in his journey.

tonykeithjr.com

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Review of Gamer Girls, by Mary Kenney

Biography, History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Gamer Girls

25 Women Who Built the Video Game Industry

written by Mary Kenney
illustrated by Salini Perera

RP Teens, 2022. 148 pages.
Review written January 9, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review

Wow! I had no idea so many women were fundamental to developing the video game industry. Yes, there are 25 featured women, but each feature has at least one “Side Quest” about a woman who achieved similar things to the featured person, and often more than one. So if anybody has any doubt that women can do great things with video games, this book completely obliterates those doubts.

Each story was fascinating. Many of the women are contemporaries with me, and so I watched most of these innovations to video games happen in my lifetime. We’ve come a long way – and I’d had no idea how many women were responsible for that. Oh, and I also loved that the author included more than one trans woman, without making a big deal of them, but including them in this book featuring accomplished women, where they belong.

Yes, there’s a lot about how innovative ideas – for example, actually making video games targeted to women, who’d have thought? – led to huge popularity, and how women overcame prejudice and stereotypes in their own creative lives. So this is especially a book to inspire girls who love computers or video games, but it’s also for anyone interested in the history of how video games developed.

I have two peeves with the book itself. The first is the horrible use of a neon orange font for headings and for the Side Quests. So terribly hard to read! I had to use a ruler slid down the page to read it at all. Maybe just a problem for my old eyes.

My second peeve is that I still have no idea why the women are presented in the order they are. It’s not alphabetical. It’s not in order of their births. It’s not in order of when they worked in the industry (which is part of the headline for each woman). I’m thinking it can’t possibly be random, but I still can’t figure out what the reasoning is, and that was distracting.

I read this whole book very slowly, a few pages and one profile at a time. It was very enjoyable that way, though perhaps if there was an overarching organization, I lost sight of it. The women did start to run together in my mind because I hadn’t figured out how to organize the information in my own brain – but mind you, I was super interested as I was reading each page.

Here’s how the author summarizes her goals for the reader in the Epilogue:

You might not remember every name, studio, and game featured in this book, and that’s okay. What I hope you do remember is this: A profound sense of joy and purpose. The knowledge that there is work to be done in this beautiful, messy field, and that you could be part of it. I hope this book dispels your fear. I hope you see a future that is growing brighter with every new developer who decides to make games. And I hope you realize that developer could be you.

I think she’s hitting those goals with this inspiring and interesting book.

marykgames.com

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Review of Mythmakers, by John Hendrix

Graphic Novel, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Mythmakers

The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien

by John Hendrix

Abrams Fanfare, 2024. 218 pages.
Review written December 4, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

This book will completely charm anyone who loves Narnia and Middle-earth.

Like John Hendrix’s amazing book, The Faithful Spy, this is a full-on well-researched work of nonfiction, complete with an index. But the format is very visual. It’s not quite a graphic novel – for one thing, it’s not a novel, but there’s also plenty of text (my one complaint is the teeny-tiny print used for most of that) giving background information. There are plenty of scenes with speech bubbles and panels, and there is some kind of picture on every spread. John Hendrix also used two characters – a wizard and a lion – to talk about the ideas that Tolkien and Lewis discussed.

I thought that was a strong point of the book. There are “portals” you can go through – referring you to a page at the back of the book – to get more in-depth information about “The Roots of Myth,” “Origin of the Fairy Tale,” “The Fantasists,” and “The Artifact Attic.”

Now besides these diversions, the wizard and the lion do a great job giving the reader the context of the two authors’ lives, including how they both saw combat in World War I and lived to see World War II – so that greatly affected their world views and their writing. We also get the story of how C. S. Lewis lost his faith during the Great War – and later was “Surprised by Joy.” Tolkien didn’t convert him, but Tolkien loomed large in his life as a man of faith.

The highlight of the book is how it shows how much their friendship affected both their lives and their writing. There’s a central chapter on the Inklings group they founded, and honestly I don’t see how anyone could read it and not wish for a group like that themselves. And it shows how Tolkien and Lewis were the heart and leaders of the group.

There’s also a contrast in their writing methods, though. Tolkien was slow, methodical, and perfectionist – working for decades on his magnum opus, The Silmarillion, which was finally published after his death. But this book makes the case that Lewis’s encouragement may have been what helped Tolkien get The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings published at all. Despite all his perfectionism, I’m still stunned to read that he didn’t realize Bilbo’s ring was the One Ring of Power until he got the hobbits to the inn at Bree. Sounds like he didn’t exactly plan things out in advance.

On the other hand, Tolkien’s comments on the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe almost prompted Lewis to throw the whole thing away! This book did, though, give me sympathy for his short-sightedness. I mean, if you’ve been spending your life painstakingly working out the background of your mythical world, and then you friend dashes off a story that combines talking animals and mythology and Father Christmas – well, I can understand that it’s not quite Tolkien’s thing. But I’m also super glad that Lewis found another reader to run the story past. He went on to write seven books about Narnia in seven years – a dramatically different pace than Tolkien published. Oh, another fun tidbit is that Ransom, the main character of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, is based on Tolkien, and the books were written as the result of a coin flip – Tolkien was supposed to write a time travel book, but never completed it.

And the book also covers the way Tolkien and Lewis drifted apart in their later years. But the author indulges in a scene of the two reuniting after death, talking about how much they appreciate each other and how fortunate they were to have each other – before they “enter the west.” In fact, after reading this book, I fully believe that the whole world is better because of their friendship and the books that would never have been quite the same if they hadn’t found each other.

If you’re at all a Lewis or Tolkien fan, get your hands on this book! I’m listing the book in Teen Nonfiction, but it’s suitable for upper elementary and middle grade readers – as long as they’re aware there’s a whole lot of text. But yes, if they are a fan of either or both authors, this is a wonderful way to find out more and think about the ideas behind their work.

johnhendrix.com

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Review of Shackled, by Candy J. Cooper

History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Shackled

A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away

by Candy J. Cooper

Calkins Creek, 2024. 192 pages.
Review written November 18, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

Shackled is a book that’s painful to read, but is tremendously important. It tells the story of a group of men, including judges, who made millions of dollars by locking kids up.

The book opens telling the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who, with her friend, wrote with Sharpie on a few street signs in 2005. She was brought before judge Mark Ciavarella in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Carisa and Agelia listened as Ciavarella judged the two girls “delinquent,” or guilty, of eighty-six counts of vandalism. In the next breath he imposed their sentence: an indefinite stay at a wilderness camp that relied on extreme discipline and boot camp-like drills. With those words the girls heard a rattling sound from a corner of the courtroom. Soon a court worker appeared holding two medieval-looking sets of shackles. The worker enchained Carisa and Angelia like cartoon criminals – wrapping heavy leather belts around their narrow waists; snapping iron handcuffs to their child-size wrists; and clamping leg irons around their slender ankles. The girls looked to their stunned parents. The court worker turned the girls away. Ciavarella called the next case. The girls clomped in their high-heeled dress shoes past the judge’s bench and toward the door.

The book goes on to explain the full scope of the judge’s scheme. He was getting kickbacks from a man who’d gotten a contract to build a new detention center for youth, as well as various other money-making opportunities to go with every child he managed to sentence. The judge and his friends made millions of dollars in a few years and found ways to hide the money. Eventually local news reporters began to uncover suspicious details – like the much higher than normal incarceration rate of teens in Luzerne county – and eventually the FBI got involved. One of the men turned informant, and they were caught in a scandalous trial.

The sad part, though, is the many young lives devastated by the judge’s arbitrary rulings – designed to line his own pockets.

The author doesn’t leave us entirely discouraged, telling about the Restorative Justice movement now gaining ground across America, and about the judge’s victims who were able to tell their stories and win justice in a civil case. Though they admit that the now-grown victims will probably never see the money – but they gained something important by getting to tell their stories.

It’s all sobering and sad, but I’m so glad this book exists to shine light on a horrible injustice carried out on thousands of kids – in the worst possible way, the name of justice itself.

candyjcooper.com
astrapublishinghouse.com

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Review of Folding Tech, by Karen Latchana Kenney

Mathematical, Science, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Folding Tech

Using Origami and Nature to Revolutionize Technology

by Karen Latchana Kenney

Twenty-First Century Books (Lerner), 2021. 104 pages.
Review written September 20, 2022, from a library book
2023 Mathical Book Prize Honor Book, Ages 11 to 18
Starred Review

Here’s a fascinating look at something I didn’t even realize was mathematical — origami. And the book explains how engineers and mathematicians studying origami have created some amazing and helpful technology.

The beginning talks about how there’s not much room in a spacecraft, but a large area is what’s needed for solar panels to power them. So in 1985, Koryo Miura proposed using an ancient folding pattern he’d studied to fit a solar array into a spacecraft. Japan launched such a craft in 1995.

Then the book talks about the long history of origami, particularly in Japan. But it’s been revived in modern times, and studying it mathematically has helped create intricate and beautiful patterns. And then when stiff materials are used instead of paper, engineers can create foldable structures easy to assemble and inexpensive to create.

Engineers also find folding in nature. I was fascinated by the way they studied how ladybugs fold their wings under their elytra (the red and black shell on top). In order to get a good look, they 3D printed a clear plastic elytra and replaced the ladybug’s own. Then they could see how the wings fold and unfold so quickly and neatly.

And there are so many uses for this technology! Besides outer space, there are even uses for tiny folds, including a foldable heart stent to go inside human arteries. There are also many uses in architecture and robots, and, really, the human imagination is the limit.

This book includes some origami designs the reader can try out. My one quibble is that I would have liked many more pictures. Some structures created using principles of origami were described in detail, and a picture would have helped visualize it. I read about a crushable beverage can with a diamond-shaped folding pattern and the Al Bahr Towers in Abu Dhabi that have a folding facade that changes shape in response to the sun. I would have liked to see pictures. Also, the James Webb telescope that made news recently as it began sending back photos of space did get a picture, but the only discussion of the folding that made that telescope possible was in the picture caption.

However, besides my little quibble (I just wanted more), this book is packed with fascinating information. My eyes are opened now, and I know I’m going to notice more folds, both in nature and in technology. A section at the end tells kids how they can pursue the path toward becoming an origami professional.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?