
Grasses swaying in the breeze,
different rocks in the river,
what stories do they tell about time and change?
Now packed into Grandmother’s small Chicago flat with her siblings and widowed mother, Agnes misses green meadows, learns to draw sidewalk flowers on old envelopes, wishes for school past 8th grade.
School soon for Marguerite, exploring the river’s edge with its intriguing rocks, across from Washington DC where her father and other Black men labor. Her parents never learned to read, yet she dreams of going to high school.
Agnes becomes a talented botanical artist, is asked to travel and survey grasses of the west at her own expense (because she’s a woman), at last working in the Smithsonian.
Marguerite longs to become a teacher, to make a difference in her world, to envision what factors increase flood risks in the nation’s capital.
Women march for the right to vote in 1913! Agnes jailed with other white women protestors, Marguerite and other Black women shunted to the end of the parade.
Will Agnes’s decades of work to find and catalogue the grasses of the world be recognized?
Can Marguerite find a university where she can earn degrees in geology?
How many women will they both inspire to learn and discover and succeed?
This evocative novel-in-verse brings us the lives and work of women who persevered in natural sciences when society’s expectations tried to limit them.
By the author of Hidden Powers: Lise Meitner’s Call to Science (recommended at https://booksyalove.com/?p=12527) and Stone Mirrors: the Sculpture and Silence of Edmonia Lewis (here https://booksyalove.com/?p=8212).
What’s your favorite museum of natural history?
**kmm
Book info: Green Promises: Girls Who Loved the Earth / Jeannine Atkins. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2025. [author site https://www.jeannineatkins.com/] [publisher site https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Green-Promises/Jeannine-Atkins/Girls-Who-Love-Science/9781665950572] Review copy & cover image courtesy of the publisher.