The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice

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."