Women History Month Children Book Recommendation Part 2 : Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty

Continuing on celebrating Women's History Month, this week I would like to share one of my favorite children's books, Rosie Revere, Engineer. 

Rosie Revere, Engineer | Image by Overdrive

Rosie Revere, Engineer is a 32-page picture book written by Andrea Beaty, which was published in 2013 for young children between the ages of 3 - 6 years old.

Rosie is a little girl who dreams of becoming a great engineer. She enjoys building her own innovative inventions like helium pants, the hot dog machine, and a snake-repellant cheese hat. However, because of Rosie's timidness and her fears of failing, she hides her inventions away under her bed. One day, Rosie's great-great Aunt Rose visits her and lets her know her goal is to fly someday. Brainstorming, Rosie spends the night coming up with ideas on how to help her great-great aunt fly. As an idea struck, Rosie comes up with the idea of building a cheese copter. Testing her invention, the cheese copter flew into the sky but then crashes to the ground. Feeling devastated, Rosie's great-great aunt reminds her that failure is a part of life and that a true failure is someone who gives up and quits. 

After reading this picture book, I felt very motivated to continue to pursue my passion for illustrating children's books because I am reminded that if I quit and give up now then I am a failure. Other important themes the book touches on are pursuing your passions, determination and resilience, creative thinking, self-esteem, and gender stereotypes. For example, Rosie learned to be resilient in refining her cheese-copter design to help her aunt achieve the goal of flying. Rosie also develops her creative thinking skills by creating various types of inventions like helium pants. As the story progress, Rosie becomes more self-confident in her creations when her aunt teaches her that it is okay to fail and to never give up — hence, at the end of the book, Rosie shares the inventions that she builds with her classmates. Lastly, the book touches on the topic of deconstructing gender stereotypes because men are more likely to build and create inventions, working in the engineering industry. In this case, the roles are reversed and illustrate that women can also do the same. This is illustrated when Rosie is constantly building various types of creations using drills, hot glue guns, oil cans, and many more.  

To end, the illustrations of this book are illustrated by David Roberts. Overall, the illustrations are very playful, and vibrant, and it adds to the overall message the book is trying to portray. When we look at the illustrations of Rosie's inventions, we can see how abstract it is, mirroring a child's imagination in a fun way. David uses a lot of thin lines and exaggerated shapes, which guides the audience through Rosie's invention. The use of a white background is also very smart because it allows the readers to be creative and imaginative as well when we see Rosie's creative inventions fill up the blank canvas.