THE GIRL WHO BUILT AN OCEAN

Science and fashion meet in this portrait of a 19th-century seamstress whose fascination with ocean life led both to multiple discoveries and to the invention of the glass-sided aquarium.

In the wake of Ocean Speaks (2020), illustrated by Katie Hickey, a profile of pioneering oceanographer Marie Tharp, Keating introduces another woman in marine science who was strong minded enough to torpedo sexist expectations. Folding lyrical touches into her measured account, the author follows Jeanne Villepreux as she learns how to use her hands to “transform a pile of nothing into a beautiful…something” in her parents’ dressmaking shop, then goes on to a successful career making high-society gowns in Paris before a move to Sicily (with “her fabric, her scissors, and her new husband”) sparks a second career studying the wildlife in the nearby shallows. Frustrated by the challenge of getting her specimens to hold still while she draws them, she constructs a waterproof glass box—and so becomes the first to discover that argonauts, a type of octopus, don’t steal their delicate shells from other creatures as was widely supposed but manufacture them, likewise “transforming what appeared to be nothing…into a beautiful something.” Nutter’s appropriately flowing illustrations take their smiling, self-possessed subject from ball gowns and formal dances to sandy beaches and work benches. Villepreux herself is White; montage sequences of colleagues worldwide receiving news of her discoveries feature both White and dark-skinned naturalists, including several other women. An afterword with a timeline fills in further detail about both the inventor and her eight-armed subjects. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A STEM-winder’s delight, awash in affirmation and the joy of discovery.