The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Rosie Revere, Engineer: A Stereotype-Defying Children’s Book Celebrating the Value of Failure

A few decades ago, it was a commendable feat for a children’s book to imagine such stereotype-defying notions as a man who does housework instead of his wife (Gone Is Gone, 1936), a black woman astronaut (Blast Off, 1973), a female architect (Need A House? Call Ms. Mouse, 1981), a same-sex family (Heather Has Two Mommies, 1989), or a female quantum physicist (Alice in Quantumland, 1995). And yet a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, we still settle for the profound failure of imagination that results in less than a third of contemporary children’s books featuring female protagonists, with a solid portion of those purveying limiting gender expectations.

Few creators have done more to enrich this impoverished landscape with imaginative alternatives than writer-illustrator duo Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, who also gave us the wonderful celebration of diversity Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau. In Rosie Revere, Engineer (public library), they tell the enormously heartening story of little Rosie — quiet schoolgirl by day, fierce inventor of gizmos by night — who dreams of becoming a bona fide engineer and learns to embrace failure as a vital part of the invention journey. In an era when we are finally understanding just how essential failure is to creative breakthroughs yet we are battling a perilous epidemic of mindsets fixed on all-or-nothing success, the message of the book is doubly encouraging and important, beyond the obvious primary motif of defying gender stereotypes.

Rosie is a tinkerer — she likes to spend time alone in her attic, making things, making “fine inventions for her aunts and uncles.”

One autumn day, Rosie’s oldest relative — her great-great-aunt Rose, “a true dynamo” — comes for a visit and tells the little girl tales of her time building airplanes during WWII. (One can trace with great delight Roberts’s visual inspiration back to those terrific Library of Congress public domain images of women constructing aircrafts in the 1930s and 1940s.)

Captivated by the riveting stories, Rosie decides to build an airplane for her great-great-aunt to fly, then tests her arduously concocted contraption “to see the ridiculous flop it might turn out to be.”

The makeshift flying device takes off for a brief moment, then crash it does, leaving little Rosie teary-eyed over her failed invention, taking it for a sign that she’ll never be a successful engineer. But, to her surprise, Great-Great-Aunt Rose pulls her in for a tight hug, congratulating her on the “perfect first try”:

It crashed. That is true.
But first it did just what it needed to do.
Before it crashed, Rosie…
before that…
it flew!
Your brilliant first flop was a raging success!
Come on, let’s get busy and on to the next!

Heartened, Rosie realizes something with which even grownups struggle daily — the idea that “the only true failure can come if you quit.”

When she returns to school, Rosie’s dreams of becoming an engineer are more vibrant than ever, and she resumes her tinkering with the newfound awareness that “each perfect failure” is cause not for despair but for cheer.

Rosie Revere, Engineer is an immeasurable delight, to which this screen does no justice — highly recommended in its tangible, tinkerable-with totality. Complement it Mark Twain’s irreverent and empowering advice to little girls, then take a grownup look at the historical value of failure in creative success and what children can teach us about failure and personal growth.


Published September 17, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/17/rosie-revere-engineer/

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