THE FIVE SIDES OF MARJORIE RICE: HOW TO DISCOVER A SHAPE, by Amy Alznauer and Anna Bron, Candlewick, March 4, 2025, Hardcover, $18.99 (ages 7-9)
The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape, by Amy Alznauer and Anna Bro, explores art and geometry through the life and lens of an amateur mathematician.
When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist.
Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old “problem of five” (why pentagons don’t fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn’t possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son’s copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn’t she?
Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She’d done it! And she’d go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations. —Synopsis provided by Candlewick
The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice is more than a biography. It’s a celebration of art, geometry, patterns, discovery, curiosity and imagination.
Author Amy Alznauer balances mathematical terms and definitions with a sense of wonder and excitement.
Anna Bro brings all these concepts alive through illustrations that range from the ordinary to extraordinary. Her use of angles, pentagons and tessellating shapes take this book over the top.
Strong back matter offers more on the story of five and suggestions on how to discover a shape.
In addition to just being fun to read, The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice has multiple classroom applications.
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