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Winterbottom, Julie

Magic in a Drop of Water: How Ruth Patrick Taught the World About Water Pollution

48 pp. | Penguin/Rocky Pond | March, 2025 | Trade ISBN 9780593620229 $19.99 | Ebook ISBN 9780593620236 $11.99
(2) K-3 Illustrated by Susan Reagan. “When Ruth Patrick was five years old, she fell in love with pond scum.” Patrick (1907–2013) spent her childhood exploring the natural world around her Kansas City, Missouri, home. Looking through her father’s microscope, she was especially entranced by diatoms, “microscopic algae that live in every body of water on Earth...Without them, we would not be here.” She attended a women’s college, studying biology, and earned a PhD in botany from the University of Virginia. While working at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, she led a team doing fieldwork on water pollution in streams and rivers throughout Pennsylvania: “No one had ever studied everything in a river before. It would be a huge job.” Along with mentoring other scientists, her lasting legacies include a clearer understanding of what’s now known as biodiversity and her tireless work on clean-water legislation. The point that this happened at a time when relatively few women were encouraged to be in the sciences is neither overlooked nor hammered home (a concluding author’s note provides more detail). The text is clear, with a storytelling flow that builds upon previous details, and the textured digital and hand-painted illustrations are naturalistic and approachable. A timeline, source notes, and a selected bibliography are also appended.
Reviewer: Elissa Gershowitz | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2025

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