Review of the Day: The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice by Amy Alznauer, ill. Anna Bron

The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape
By Amy Alznauer
Illustrated by Anna Bron
Candlewick Press
$18.99
ISBN: 9781536229479
Ages 5-9
On shelves March 4, 2025

In spite of the fact that she serves on the mathematics faculty at Northwestern University, there is actually no reason why Amy Alznauer would necessarily limit herself to children’s books that contain math in them. Indeed, in the past she’s written books like Flying Paintings: The Zhou Brothers: A Story of Revolution and Art, which was about as far from numbers and equations as you might possibly get. Still, it was her picture book biography, The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity: A Tale of the Genius Ramanujan that really caught my eye back in 2020. I’ve a keen appreciation for any book for kids that tries to get them to think of math as something fun rather than something to be feared. That book was good, but it cannot hold a candle to the work Alzauer has put into Marjorie Rice’s tale. Folks who don’t deal with math on a regular basis may forget, on occasion, that mathematics isn’t just numbers and equations. It’s also patterns and puzzles, and the clever way that Alznauer lures the reader into this book is by setting the title up like a mystery. Could this woman, Marjorie Rice, crack a tricky mathematical puzzle? And if she could… why would she?

Born in the 1930s, young Marjorie loved patterns. She had no idea of them as mathematical concepts, of course. They were the shapes you found in the wild and, later, the shapes that would become letters. Art and geometry enthralled her, but at her parents’ bidding she studied to be a secretary instead. Much later she was living in a home with five children, reading her son’s Scientific American when she learned about something fascinating. There was still a chance for people to discover new shapes. Which is to say, shapes that could interlock perfectly without any gaps between them. Inspired, Marjorie began to experiment. She puzzled and experimented and suddenly she found a shape that had never been discovered before. And after that, even more! A fascinating deep dive into one woman’s inquiring mind into an all new world.

Truly great picture book biographies are never truly just about their subjects, though all too often that’s how they’re presented. Such n’ was born, lived, and died. Now plug in a final sentence about their legacy aaaaaand…. we done. Except that formula is relatively useless when it comes to the truly great bios. Alznauer here isn’t really just writing a bio. She is also writing a history of a mathematical puzzle and mystery. But… nope. Nope. That’s still not enough. It’s neat, but where’s the heart? Where’s the human connection? So just to make sure that everything works perfectly, Alznauer adds a third, dicier element. She traces Marjorie’s own personal relationship to mathematics. From her school days to attempting to follow her son’s math homework to finally discovering the concept of inventing shapes, and engaging with that process fully. You have to be invested in her as a person to fully appreciate what it was that she was doing with shapes. And like a juggler, Alznauer keeps all three of these balls in the air, impressing us all.

Now let us, just for a moment, think about the role of the housewife in children’s literature. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? Old timey picture books, no double. The mom in Blueberries for Sal (canning blueberries like there’s no tomorrow while simultaneously watching over a kid who has a tendency to encounter, I dunno, BEARS!). Or maybe the mom in the Lyle Lyle Crocodile books (who at least got to go antique shopping and skating with him, so it’s not all bad). But we all have that image in our mind, right? The mom with the apron tending the home. A lot of the time she’s not even seen (hat tip to you, Max’s mom in Where the Wild Things Are). The wave of picture books in which moms now had jobs came, but while there are still plenty of stay-at-home moms in the real world, they don’t tend to get books of their own. That’s not terribly surprising when you consider that adults in general don’t tend to star in children’s books unless they’re furry animals (there are exceptions but animal adults definitely pop up more than their human equivalents). And in nonfiction picture books? Forgettaboutit! So to see a stay-at-home mom (something familiar to a bunch of kids out there) with not just an interior life but a goal that she strives for, all kept within the boundaries of the life she made (and reported without judgement) in a book that shows just how doggone brilliant she was… that isn’t just rare. It’s unheard of.

Here is a word of advice when selecting an illustrator for you math and shapes book: Find one that isn’t afraid of the topic. I can’t tell you how many math-related picture books I’ve encountered over the years where the artist’s instincts to choose pretty over accurate has thwarted what could otherwise be an interesting title. Anna Bron’s work on Marjorie Rice isn’t like that at all. First and foremost, her style reminded me quite a bit of Barbara McClintock’s when she worked on Nothing Stopped Sophie: The Story of Unshakable Mathematician Sophie Germain. In both cases, math works its way into the very fabric of its subject’s world. Since Marjorie spent so much of her time at home, it’s fascinating to watch Bron turn her very house into a representative combination of different shapes. The shapes serve a variety of different purposes on these pages, acting as both small confines and representative examples of how Marjorie’s world was expanded, thanks to them. This is no easy matter. Even better, the art in this book keeps the eye constantly moving. There is nothing static about this book. One minute you’re looking down at Marjorie as she sprawls on a rug and the next it’s side views in the kitchen. By the way, someone should give Ms. Bron a chunk of change for her depiction of a 50s/60s household. At one point you get a view of Marjorie’s kitchen and the paintings on the side of the pots on the stove were so blooming familiar, I started to have flashbacks. Impressive only begins to scratch the surface.

A lot of children’s picture book biographies will talk about the women that escaped the strictures of working in the home and just in the home. But if ALL the picture book bios you read talk about that, what do you have in comparison? Alzauer and Bron work together to show how a housewife from the past could still have a rich and full interior life, even going so far as to be the first to make mathematical discoveries. “Even if you haven’t studied art or math, even if you’ve never gone to college, you can make shapes yourself and change how the world looks.” There are plenty of biographies out there about folks who went on to do huge things that changed the course of nations. How much more exciting it is, sometimes, to learn about someone who discovered one truly new thing for the very first time. A little book of discovery couched in both the familiar and unfamiliar at once.

On shelves March 4th

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