Updated: Aug 28, 2025
The Story of Mariam Al-Shaar
and her Food Truck of Hope
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Chronicle Books
pub. 4.1.2025
44 pages
Ages 5 - 8
Author: Leila Boukarim
Illustrator: Sona Avedikian
Character: Mariam Al-Shaar
Overview:
"Once Mariam decides to start a food business in the refugee camp where she’s spent her whole life, she must see her dream through.
She will need money.
She will need the right papers.
People will tell her it’s impossible.
They will tell her not to risk it.
But with the women of the camp behind her, she is determined to make it happen."
Tantalizing taste:
"More walls stand in her way -
walls of rules,
of injustice,
of discrimination.
But Mariam has a mission.
She has a story.
She has a team of talented women who make food
that is meant to be shared.
No wall can stop her.
And so she charges ahead."
And something more: Leila Boukarim in the Author's Note explains: "Conditions at Mariam's refugee camp are difficult, particularly for women. But in the face of darkness and hopelessness, Mariam has dedicated herself to improving life there by empowering the people, by helping them learn the skills they need to do meaningful work... Since creating Soufra, Mariam has gone on to open a preschool as well as a Soufra Cafe in Bourj Al-Barajneh!"
Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Lamps
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Peachtree
pub. 6.24.2025
32 pages
Ages 7 - 10
Author: Sandra Nickel
Illustrator: Julie Paschkis
Character: Clara Driscoll
Overview:
"Drawing inspiration from her childhood gardens, Clara Driscoll created designs for Louis C. Tiffany's stained glass windows. Clara had such a flare for glass that Tiffany put her in charge of a special workroom, staffed with women—called the Tiffany Girls. But Clara wanted more. She wanted to create a three-dimensional work that would make light bloom. So she figured out how to engineer a lamp—how to shape and bend glass and light it so that her designs sprung to colorful, vivid life.
Today, we all recognize Tiffany lamps, but we almost forgot the woman who created them."
Tantalizing taste:
"To recreate the flowers, Clara searched through two tons of glass sheets stored in the baement. She found whites dappling to greens and yellows ripening to orange. With the help of the Tiffany Girls, she made each lamp burst with color, turning her love of nature into bright bouquets of glass...
Louis [Tiffany] died and so did Clara, and still, no one knew Clara had designed the lamps.
Until one day .... Clara's letters to her sisters and mother were discovered in an attic. Another bundle was found in a desk. And the readers learned the secret that had been hidden for so long.
Clara Driscoll was the creator of the garden lamps. Because of her, light bloomed - and still blooms - throughout the world."
And something more: Sandra Nickel in the Author's Note explains: "Missing home is often bittersweet. But in Clara's case, being homesick not only led her to create one of the most iconic pieces of American decorative art, it also resulted in her documenting that creation by writing hundreds of letters to her mother and sisters. Clara's letters act like a diary and tell us about her creative work and love for her home..." And it's wonderful learning that author Sandra Nickel read these letters -- incredible primary sources which add such depth to this beautifully written and illustrated true story!
How To Discover a Shape
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Candlewick Press
pub. 3.4.2025
48 pages
Grades 2 - 4
Author: Amy Alznauer
Illustrator: Anna Bron
Character: Marjorie Rice
Overview:
"When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist.
Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old “problem of five” (why pentagons don’t fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn’t possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son’s copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn’t she?
Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She’d done it! And she’d go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations"
Tantalizing taste:
"Maybe it was math and art together or those two marvelous ideas - fitting and forever- but quiet, wonderstruck, earth-moving Marjorie was drawn in ... to a story that had begun eons before she was born ...
Marjorie had never gone to college. Her children knew more math than she did. But still, she couldn't help it. A beautiful, brave idea began to take shape in her mind.
'What if I could find still another type?'"
And something more: Amy Alznauer in the Author's Note explains: "Marjorie [made] a gentle trap for spiders... so she could safely carry them outside. Marjorie loved nature in general, but I imagine she must have felt a particular kinship with those small, eight-legged creatures in her home who, like her, spent much of their time quietly spinning shapes in secret."
