Synopsis
Fictional portrait of Mary Anning, the thirteen-year-old English girl who found the first ichthyosaur fossil
Reviews
Grade 5-9-- Mary Anning is the perfect subject for a children's biography, for she was only 13 when, in 1811, she became the first person to discover the fossil of an entire marine dinosaur. Cole does a wonderful job of describing Anning's struggles to overcome the biases of the times, the English town in which she lived, and its prejudices. Anning always had to fight to win the approval of both her parents and the gossipy townspeople, who thought it improper for a young girl to spend her days fossil hunting at the beach. While Cole's facts sometimes differ from the accounts in Fradin's Remarkable Children: Twenty Who Made History (Little, 1987), she also mentions that much of the information on her subject was sketchy, nonexistent, or false. Her novel is entirely believable, and her sensitivity to Anning's plight can't help but remind readers that it wasn't so long ago that women had little say as to the direction of their own lives. Children will identify with Anning's struggles with friends, family, and the ever-present poverty, but by including the societal instigators of her many problems--classism and sexism--Cole refuses to write down to her audience, or to simplify history. She presents here not only the effects, but also the historical causes, and for that she should be commended. --Cathryn A. Camper, Minneapolis Public Library
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Mary Anning's ``curiosities,'' gathered from the Dorset cliffs near Lyme Regis, were fossils to be sold to tourists who visited Britain's southern coast in the early 1800's. Mary learned her trade from her father; her treasures were part of the family's livelihood after his death. But not only tourists were interested in her work, which included the first discovery of an ichthyosaur skeleton when Mary was 13; while townspeople thought her peculiar and unladylike, others staked their scholarly reputations on her finds--without giving her credit. Working from ``fragmented facts'' in order to right such wrongs, Cole creates a vividly personal narration of Mary's triumphs and setbacks. The attitudes of the time, Mary's occasional despair over her choices, and the beaches she combed are all meticulously evoked. A careful preface and epilogue round out the picture. (Fiction. 9+) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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