No happy ending here-on its test run, this copter built with hula hoops, tennis balls, spray cheese and an office chair lifts off, sputters and then crashes. It was the last goal left on her long list! Rosie casts aside her resultant fears from the cheese hat debacle and sets to work on a heli-o-cheese-copter (first spray cheese is weaponized, now it’s an aeronautical propellant-a subtextual commentary on the most artificial of artificial foods?). Aunt Rose confides to Rosie that after all of the work she had done on airplanes years ago, she’s never actually flown. Her dreams only go dark until her great-great-aunt Rose comes for a visit. As if a compacted Künstlerroman in miniature, the story follows Rosie as she struggles to cope with every artist’s most familiar enemy: failure.
This discouraging vignette is the conflict point in Andrea Beaty’s effervescent picture book Rosie Revere, Engineer. “Oh, truly I do.”- but even kindhearted misunderstandings can snuff out a beginner’s enthusiasm. Readers know that the chuckles were out of tickled endearment-“I love it,” Fred hooted. But Fred, seemingly quite comfortable with a python coiled around his bald pate, laughs and laughs when presented with the hat, and in a blaze of embarrassment, Rosie chucks her invention back onto the shelf and stuffs her engineering dreams alongside it. According to second grader Rosie Revere’s schematics, the contraption composed of fan parts and cheddar cheese spray should have done the trick. We’ll never know if the cheese hat would’ve kept the snakes off of Zookeeper Fred’s head.
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