WHEN SUE FOUND SUE

The story of the discovery of the most complete T. Rex fossil to date and the shy autodidact after whom it is named.

Readers will definitely come away knowing at least two things about Sue Hendrickson (or three, counting the long blonde mane that makes her instantly locatable in Sudyka’s outdoorsy scenes): first, that as a child she was shy—Buzzeo uses the word seven times in her short narrative—and second, that she was born to, as the author repeatedly puts it, “find things.” As tantalizing references in both the main account and the afterword note, that curiosity has turned up a number of lost and hidden treasures, from amber to shipwrecks, but it is for Sue that she is best known. That discovery begins with four summers spent “digging for duckbills” in South Dakota, climaxed by the dramatic moment she spots “three enormous backbones” protruding from a cliff. The narrative continues through the painstaking process of removing the fossils bone by bone, then seeing the dinosaur at last reconstructed (after a long brangle over ownership) at Chicago’s Field Museum. The prehistoric Sue poses regally at the close in both a painted portrait and a tailpiece photograph; though often seen alone, in group scenes, the white, human one works with a racially diverse set of colleagues.

Tendentious role modeling commingled with an exciting tale of dino discovery.