Most children finish a book about Marie Curie able to tell you she won two Nobel Prizes and unable to tell you what she did to earn either one. That is what happens to a life this famous, and it is the thing to watch for before you hand this one over, because the good half of the book is the half about the labour.
The outline is not in dispute. Born in Warsaw in 1867, when Poland was under Russian rule and the university at home would not take a woman. Off to Paris to study physics and mathematics. Married Pierre Curie, worked with him, found two new elements, shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics, won a second one in chemistry in 1911, and died in 1934 of years of exposure to what she had found. The store bands it 2 to 5, so it sits at the young end of what a child can read alone, and it works as a read-aloud below that. It is $6.99.
The science it actually teaches
Here is the setup a child needs and rarely gets. In 1896 Henri Becquerel put uranium salts in a drawer on top of a wrapped photographic plate and the plate came out fogged. Something was coming off the uranium and going through the wrapper. Nobody knew what, and looking at a fogged plate does not tell you how much.
Curie's first move is the one worth teaching, because it is what turned a curiosity into a science. She stopped looking and started measuring. Pierre and his brother had built an instrument that could read very small amounts of electric charge, and she used it on the air around a sample. The rays knock pieces off the molecules in air, and damaged air carries a current. Now the effect has a number on a dial. You can compare one rock with another. You can put it in an order.
What the numbers told her was strange. The effect depended only on how much uranium was in the sample. It did not care what compound the uranium was in, whether it was wet or dry, heated or cooled, powdered or solid. Chemistry could not change it. So it was not chemistry. It was coming out of the atom itself, which in 1898 was supposed to be the one thing in nature that never changed or came apart. She gave the effect its name, and radioactivity is her word.
Then the number did what a good measurement does. It refused to add up. Pitchblende, the black ore, read far higher than its uranium content allowed. She could have blamed the instrument. Instead she trusted it and drew the only other conclusion: something else in that rock was more active than uranium and nobody had ever seen it. Two new elements came out of that stubbornness, polonium and radium.
And then the part almost nobody tells a child. Getting from that conclusion to a piece of radium anyone could hold took years of manual labour in a leaking shed. Tons of ore waste, boiled down in batches, stirred with an iron rod nearly as tall as she was, then separated and re-separated and separated again, because each round left the radium a little less mixed with everything else. The end of all that was a smear of radium salt you could have lost in a spoon. This is the honest picture of experimental science, and a child who gets it will never again think the job is having a clever thought in a clean room.
One more, because it is the one that saves lives. When war came she fitted vehicles with X-ray equipment, trained the operators, and got them to the wounded, so a surgeon could see a bullet or a broken bone before cutting. Physics on the bench in 1898, in a truck near a battlefield inside twenty years.
How much of that survives inside a hundred pages is what to check as you read it with your child. The prizes and the marriage compress easily. The shed does not, and it is the part to slow down for.
The child it lands with
The child who likes making a mess on purpose, and who is happier with a bucket than a worksheet. The one who has been told that science is thinking, and needs to see that it is often lifting, stirring and repeating. And the young reader who is not ready for a long book but is ready for a serious one, which is the gap this band actually fills.
One place to stop and talk
The shed is the place. She stirred boiling vats of black rock for years, in the cold, to end up with a speck of radium smaller than a crumb. Ask why she did not stop. There is no right answer, and whatever your child says will tell you something about your child.
What to know going in
This book ends with a woman dying of her own work, and that should not be smoothed over.
She handled radioactive material with bare hands for decades, carried tubes of it in her pockets, and by every account liked that it glowed in the dark. Nobody understood the damage at the time. She died in 1934 of a blood disorder that is now attributed to that exposure, and her notebooks from those years are still radioactive and are stored in shielded boxes. The same material killed other people who worked with it, including the women who painted glowing numbers onto watch dials. A child old enough for this book is old enough to sit with the fact that the answer to whether it was worth it is not a simple yes.
There is a sudden death as well. Pierre Curie was killed in a street accident in Paris in 1906, in the middle of the story, and it is not softened by being brief.
And then the weakness that comes with a book this short about a person this famous. The compression pulls hard toward the poster version, where a woman who died of an experiment becomes an inspiring quotation. Push back on that while you read. The interesting thing about her is not that she persevered. It is that she measured what everybody else was only looking at.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at Who Was Marie Curie?. The 2 to 5 band is the reason to take this one seriously as a first real science biography, because it will go to a second grader on your lap and to a fifth grader alone, and it is the same book either way. The Stealth Science shelf holds the rest. Treat it as the book that starts the argument rather than the one that settles it, and expect to be asked for something longer about radium inside a month.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
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.
