DETERMINED DREAMER

How does a young woman shoulder past personal tragedies and gender prejudice to achieve her dream?

In Marie Curie’s case, by being “unstoppable” in her desire to become a scientist, in Hopkinson’s view. This outline of her brilliant career follows her from early years as “a child who wanted to learn” (“just like you,” the author notes leadingly) through her first glimpse of radium’s eerie “luminous light”—and the deaths of her mother, sister, and commendably supportive husband, Pierre—to well-earned renown as the winner of not one but two Nobel Prizes and her relatively early death from, probably, exposure to radiation. The author’s note closes with Curie’s affirmation that whatever comes in life, “still one must always work,” and though her daughters do draw mentions, the focus throughout here is less on her private character than her labors and achievements. Hill places her small, quietly resolute figure in various finely detailed period settings from a genteel family home in Warsaw to the cluttered lab in Paris where she conducted most of her laborious early research. Human figures are uniformly light-skinned until a final view of a diverse group of modern children gathered in delight around a spectacularly foamy chemistry experiment.

Little sign of the person beneath the icon, but a better role model for kids facing glass ceilings would be hard to find.