MAZIE'S AMAZING MACHINES

A child who loves engineering builds machines to help others with their problems.

Using pulleys, levers, ramps, and more, Mazie McGear makes lifting heavy objects and even feeding the dog, Doodle, easier for the rest of the family, who are all light-skinned and red-haired. Mazie’s brother, Jake, finds the constant engineering irritating, but when Doodle gets stuck on the roof, it’s up to Mazie to get him down. Though Mazie’s whimsical Rube Goldberg–esque contraptions demonstrate that engineering can be both useful and fun, many readers will find Jake’s frustrations with his overbearing sibling reasonable. Mazie’s “waker-upper rocket machine,” designed to prevent him from sleeping in, is downright “engi-noying,” as Jake puts it. His suddenly enthusiastic reaction to Mazie’s commandeering his basketball and using a “teeter-lever” to help him sink baskets is unrealistic, and the definitions of engineering-related terms interspersed throughout make the story feel contrived and purposeful. The limited palette, dominated by orange, gray, turquoise, and sepia, and lack of backgrounds in many of the illustrations give the tale a hollow and flat impression even as busy and crowded layouts interrupt the flow and result in the randomly inserted rhymes getting lost in the action. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An accessible but bland and clunky exploration of basic engineering concepts.