Rosie Revere, Engineer
By Regan McMahon,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Aspiring engineer learns to keep on trying in upbeat tale.
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What's the Story?
A second-grader named Rosie is an aspiring engineer who creates inventions out of found objects and trash, including a hot dog dispenser, helium pants, and a hat for her zookeeper uncle that shoots cheese to keep snakes away. When her uncle laughs at that invention, she gets discouraged. But then her great-great-aunt Rose, who worked constructing airplanes in World War II (complete with Rosie the Riveter red-and-white bandana), comes for a visit and tells her about all the things she did in her life and "the goals she had checked off her list one by one." Her one unfulfilled dream was to fly. So Rosie decides to build a flying machine so her aunt can achieve that goal. When it crashes, Rosie is upset and concludes that she'll never be a great engineer. But her aunt points out that it did fly before it crashed, and that failing is part of the process: "Your brilliant first flop was a raging success! / Come on, let's get busy and on to the next!"
Is It Any Good?
ROSIE REVERE, ENGINEER is a wonderful book filled with humor, delightful rhyming verse, and colorful, detailed watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations. It has a message to impart, but it does so with a light touch and in the context of a good story with emotional ups and downs.
Young Rosie is confident and creative but gets hurt when well-meaning adults laugh at her inventions. Once she learns that mishaps on the road to invention don't mean she's a failure, she regains her belief in herself and is back at work, building gadgets and gizmos and following her dream to be "a great engineer."
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about life goals and dreams. What would you like to be when you grow up?
How does the artist show Rosie's many moods? How does she look different when she's happy, sad, disappointed, worried?
Is there someone in your family -- an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent -- you'd like to be like? Why?
Book Details
- Author: Andrea Beaty
- Illustrator: David Roberts
- Genre: Picture Book
- Topics: Great Girl Role Models , Science and Nature
- Book type: Fiction
- Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
- Publication date: September 3, 2013
- Publisher's recommended age(s): 5 - 9
- Number of pages: 32
- Available on: Nook, Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
- Last updated: March 4, 2020
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