Mattie and the Machine
The real Margaret (Mattie) E. Knight was a historic figure: one of the first women inventors of the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution. She also possessed an indomitable personality that helped her succeed in the face of many obstacles. She’s a perfect subject for a middle-grade novel that should inspire young women—and young men—to tackle mechanical design and other STEM subjects.
An engineer herself, Lynn Ng Quezon makes Mattie both admirable and appealing and the workings of machinery positively delightful. This lively novel opens in Massachusetts just after the Civil War, in the bag division of a factory called Columbia Paper, where Mattie is crawling out from under a machine she’s just repaired. She’s more than a female factory hand; she’s made herself into a mechanic, and she moves on through triumphs and treachery and patient labor to the satisfying end of the novel.
Amazing as it seems now, a paper bag was a novelty in the 1860s. The first factory-made ones still required hand gluing, but Mattie invented a machine that did the whole job. Along the way, the fictional Mattie experiences friendship, romance, heartache, and a machine-building contest that she wins over a male opponent. But the process of getting a patent demands more of her than the process of design. For one thing, it’s expensive. For another, she discovers that once again she has a rival!
Quezon concludes with diagrams of Mattie’s actual machine, also featured on the book’s rather dull cover, which unfortunately gives no sense of the appealing and very human characters in the story. If possible, it would have aided the reader to see the diagrams at the appropriate moments in the text.
