Dressing up — or down
Mary Wears What She Wants Keith Negley Balzer + Bray Ages 4 to 7
Author-illustrator Keith Negley first came to my attention four or five years ago with My Dad Used to Be So Cool and Tough Guys (Have Feelings Too). Both were very male-oriented but far from macho; the second title says it.
His latest picture book focuses on a little girl — a feisty one, with a mind of her own, as you can see by the way she struts across the cover illustration.
Mary lived at a time when girls weren’t allowed to wear pants; the only things they could wear were uncomfortable dresses — “heavy-andhot-and-hard-to-breathein dresses.”
So Mary Walker put on a pair of pants and “liked it so much she went into town to show everyone.” When they accused her of wearing boys’ clothes, she had a ready reply: “I’m wearing MY clothes!”
The real-life Mary Walker, born in Oswego, N.Y., in 1832, was one of the first women known to wear pants. She graduated from medical school in 1855, was a surgeon in the Civil War, received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1865 and died in 1919, having “continued to wear what she wanted …”
Killer Style Serah-marie Mcmahon and Alison Matthews David Illustrated by Gillian Wilson Owlkids Books Ages 9 to 12
Lavishly illustrated with archival photos and artwork, this book — subtitled How Fashion
Has Injured, Maimed, & Murdered Through History — will appeal to anyone with a taste for clothes and the macabre.
The Toronto-based authors give us everything from “murderous mercury hats” (a bit of mercury could help transform even the cheapest furs into felt) to “lethal lead makeup.”
Radium gets covered, as do factory fatalities. But the section that stayed with me longest was titled “Poisonous Green” about a vibrant shade of green created by a chemist in 1775 “that could be applied to clothing, wallpaper, toys, and even candy.” One of the pigment’s ingredients was arsenic and it was found that “a green gown could easily contain 900 grains of arsenic and shed 60 grains over the course of an evening of dancing. It would take only four or five grains to kill the average adult.” When those findings were made public, “there was a mass fear of all things green.”