When thirteen-year-old geek-girl Charley Morton decides to build what she believes is Leonardo da Vinci's design for a time machine for the middle school science fair, she has two thoughts in mind: to win first prize and to travel back in time to meet her idol, Leonardo. Her goal: to find out how the Renaissance artist, engineer, scientist, musician, anatomist, and inventor managed to do it all.
(123 pages)
When the author's publicist reached out to me to about reviewing these two books, I was intrigued by the description of Payes's Edge of Yesterday learning platform focused on bringing girls to STEM/STEAM. As a second-year female computer science student myself, I am always interested in developments in that area.
I'm afraid that I was pretty disappointed, though. For starters, the books were both pretty short and moved jerkily. The plot moved slowly in some ways and way too fast in others, and the main characters' personalities are pretty roughly sketched out.
My main issue with the books has less to do with the writing than it does with its central purpose: encouraging girls to enter STEM. I can tell that Payes means well, but Charley basically comes across as a slightly ditzy girl with lots of half-hearted interests and a soppy fangirl attraction to a historical figure. She doesn't invent the time machine, or even the idea for the time machine–she literally just follows clues left behind by a vision and a male time traveller from the past to figure out approximately what should happen, then hands the materials over to her genius friend Billy to actually construct it. Then she accidentally triggers it and winds up in the past.
I'm serious. In a series meant to be about female empowerment, the female main character follows the lead of one guy and literally hands over the technical part of the construction to another guy. How is that empowering? Why couldn't Charley have been the one to do the wiring and figure out how to make the time machine work? I've read fantasy novels set in entirely different worlds with girls who do more hands-on technical work, and yet this is touting itself as a platform for encouraging girls to go into STEM.
And that's not even going into the issues I had with Charley's (often idiotic) behavior in the past, and her new "friend" who happens to look and often behave exactly like a friend from her own time who's been acting catty lately. Because of course the only female friendship in the entire series has to be a negative one.
Gah. I'm just done with this. We could argue about whether "rah-rah girls in science!" books are even necessary, but if you're promising to offer an empowering story then you need to come through on that promise.
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of these books in exchange for an honest review.
When the author's publicist reached out to me to about reviewing these two books, I was intrigued by the description of Payes's Edge of Yesterday learning platform focused on bringing girls to STEM/STEAM. As a second-year female computer science student myself, I am always interested in developments in that area.
I'm afraid that I was pretty disappointed, though. For starters, the books were both pretty short and moved jerkily. The plot moved slowly in some ways and way too fast in others, and the main characters' personalities are pretty roughly sketched out.
My main issue with the books has less to do with the writing than it does with its central purpose: encouraging girls to enter STEM. I can tell that Payes means well, but Charley basically comes across as a slightly ditzy girl with lots of half-hearted interests and a soppy fangirl attraction to a historical figure. She doesn't invent the time machine, or even the idea for the time machine–she literally just follows clues left behind by a vision and a male time traveller from the past to figure out approximately what should happen, then hands the materials over to her genius friend Billy to actually construct it. Then she accidentally triggers it and winds up in the past.
I'm serious. In a series meant to be about female empowerment, the female main character follows the lead of one guy and literally hands over the technical part of the construction to another guy. How is that empowering? Why couldn't Charley have been the one to do the wiring and figure out how to make the time machine work? I've read fantasy novels set in entirely different worlds with girls who do more hands-on technical work, and yet this is touting itself as a platform for encouraging girls to go into STEM.
And that's not even going into the issues I had with Charley's (often idiotic) behavior in the past, and her new "friend" who happens to look and often behave exactly like a friend from her own time who's been acting catty lately. Because of course the only female friendship in the entire series has to be a negative one.
Gah. I'm just done with this. We could argue about whether "rah-rah girls in science!" books are even necessary, but if you're promising to offer an empowering story then you need to come through on that promise.
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of these books in exchange for an honest review.
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