Your five year old loved Rosie Revere, Engineer. This is not Rosie Revere, Engineer.
That sentence is most of what a parent needs from this page. The picture book is a read-aloud, big art, a few hundred words, done in one sitting on a lap. This is a chapter book: a proper text block, small type, pictures that break the reading up rather than carry it, and a plot with a sagging middle in it on purpose. Same girl, same author, entirely different object.
What happens: Rosie's Aunt Rose and her friends, women who built airplanes during the Second World War, need something invented. Rosie takes the job. Rosie fails. Rosie fails again. Then, with Iggy Peck and Ada Twist alongside her, she gets it done.
First in the Questioneers chapter book series.
The science it actually teaches
The engineering in here is process, not content. Nobody finishes this book knowing how a wing works.
What they finish it with is the thing engineers actually spend their days doing. A failed build is not a verdict on you. It is information about the design, and the correct response is to write down what happened and change one thing. One thing. A child who changes five things at once and gets a different result has learned nothing at all, and this book puts that in front of them as a story rather than a lecture.
There is real history holding it up as well. The Riveters are women who built military aircraft while the war was on, and that happened, at scale, and most children have never heard about it. A rivet is a pin dropped through two sheets of metal and then swelled at the far end so it cannot come back out. That is how an aluminum aircraft skin is held together: not glue, not screws. If your child asks what a riveter riveted, there is the answer.
The child it lands with
You know the child who abandons a build the second it goes wrong. Who sweeps it off the table rather than look at it again. This book is aimed straight at that child, and it is one of very few that manages it without preaching, because Rosie genuinely loses heart in the middle and the story sits in that discomfort for a while before it lifts her out.
For a child moving from picture books into chapters, the shape is right as well: short chapters, a familiar face, plenty of art on the page.
One place to stop and talk
Keep score.
Get a piece of paper out before you start and rule a column for every attempt Rosie makes. After each failure, write one line: what she tried, and what went wrong. Do not write down how she felt about it. That part is the story and it takes care of itself.
By the end you have a list, and the list is the point. Put it in front of your child and see whether they can work out what each attempt gave her that the one before it did not. That is an engineering notebook, and the two of you have just made one without anybody saying the word.
Then, if it is going well, go and get something your child gave up on. A model, a drawing, a thing made mostly of tape. What did the first attempt tell them? Most children have never once been asked that question, and it changes how the next one goes.
What to know going in
The failure sequence is long on purpose, and for some children that is the wrong medicine at the wrong time. Rosie flops, flops again, and loses hope, and the book stays down there for a while. If your child is currently fragile about their own work, read the middle of this one alongside them instead of handing it over.
The other thing is the band. The store tags this at grades 1 to 4. The top of that band is right and the bottom is not. A first grader is not reading this alone. Buy it for a second or third grader to read to themselves, or for a five or six year old to be read to, and it is money well spent either way. Buy it because the picture book was a hit and the child is five, and it will sit on a shelf unread and you will think your child went off Rosie.
The war is mentioned, not depicted. There is no combat in it. But "they built airplanes during the war" is a sentence that raises a question in a six year old, so have your answer ready before it arrives.
Where to get it
$7.99 at Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters. This is book one, and unlike a lot of series it genuinely matters that it is: the friendships the later books lean on get built here. Buying more than one? Buy this first and read them in order. Buying exactly one, for a seven year old who quits the moment a thing goes wrong? Then this is the right one no matter what order you read them in. It earns its place on the Stealth Science shelf for a habit rather than a fact, which makes it the odd one out over there and, for that particular child, the most useful thing on it.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants: Why Helium Goes Up
Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants: The Questioneers Book #2 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion: Reading a House
Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion: The Questioneers Chapter Book #3 by Andrea Beaty
Grade 1 to 4
Caterflies and Ice: The Book Where Zoey Gets It Wrong
Caterflies and Ice: Zoey and Sassafras #4 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Dragons and Marshmallows: The Science and the Catch
Dragons and Marshmallows: Zoey and Sassafras #1 by Asia Citro
Grade 1 to 4
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
