Tag Archive | Sweden

Tapping her HIDDEN POWERS: LISE MEITNER’S CALL TO SCIENCE, by Jeannine Atkins (YA book review)

book cover of Hidden Powers: Lise Meitner's Call to Science, by Jeannine Atkins. Published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers | recommended on BooksYALove.com

School through age fourteen,
prepare to raise a family,
but she wants more, so much more!

In a time when new elements are being added to the periodic table, Lise longs to be a scientist, to study further – so unladylike for the early 1900s!

But she persists, going to university, earning her PhD, hearing the discoveries of Planck and Einstein and Hahn from the great men themselves – so much more to learn!

Segregated in her Berlin basement laboratory away from the university’s male chemists and physicists, Lise makes an electroscope to examine radioactive substances – surely they can fill the periodic table’s gaps!

She publishes her important findings in academic journals before and during and after World War I – Dr. L. Meitner is applauded, yet her male co-researchers get more of the credit.

Hitler invades her home country of Austria in 1938 – safety for a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany will soon be impossible!

Can Lise escape to another country?
How will she continue her research?
Why did her lab partner alone get a Nobel Prize for their work on nuclear fission??

This biography in verse is a worthy addition to your reading list for International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February or any day!

What woman of science do you think should be more celebrated for her work?
**kmm

Book info: Hidden Powers: Lise Meitner’s Call to Science / Jeannine Atkins. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2022. [author site] [publisher site] Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.

Me On the Floor, Bleeding, by Jenny Jagerfeld (book review) – thumbtip gone, mom gone, Maja is… where?

book cover of Me On the Floor, Bleeding by Jenny Jagerfeld published by Stockholm TextMaja really wouldn’t harm herself.
Mum really wouldn’t forget their weekend plans.
Dad really wouldn’t assume the worst (yes, he would).

A classic outsider at her high school, Maja is willing to wander a bit further in search of the truth than the adults in her life are comfortable with.

Not the first book-in-translation that I’ve featured on BooksYALove, but its publisher is my first small press from Sweden. Hope to see more YA from Stockholm Text in the future!

**kmm

Book info: Me On the Floor, Bleeding / Jenny Jagerfeld; translated by Susan Beard. Stockholm Text, 2014.   [author site in Swedish]  [publisher site]  Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.

My book talk: When Maja is injured at school, everyone worries that she did it on purpose… except her mom, who’s gone missing. The Swedish teen’s search turns up more answers than she was looking for.

If she hadn’t been trying to make a bookshelf instead of sculpture for art class, the 17 year old wouldn’t have mangled the tip of her thumb in the electric saw after hours.

If Mum had answered her text, Maja wouldn’t have taken the train to an empty house for her visiting weekend and found Mum’s mobile phone left behind.

If Justin next door hadn’t helped Maja clean up after yet another accident, they wouldn’t have gone to the coffeehouse together, or the bar, or his room.

And Maja keeps flashing back to the whirling saw blade and the blood and Mum’s increasingly odd communications. Where are the answers?