Books like Hedy Lamarr's Double Life: Hollywood Legend and Brilliant Inventor
By Laurie Wallmark
For the kid who wants to be told, again and again, that people can be more than one thing — this is proof, in the shape of a movie star with a workshop. Glamorous, inventive, quietly defiant.
A true story about a young inventor who builds his own microphone from a broomstick, a cinderblock, and a telephone, then goes on to engineer the world's first solid-body electric guitar.
Two sisters wake before sunrise six days a week to practice tennis, pushing through boos and taunts from a sport that didn't expect them, on their way to becoming legends.
A secret night-time inventor builds gadgets from odds and ends, but hides them under her bed until her great-great-aunt Rose visits and helps her see her crashed flying machine as a success, not a failure.
A musical girl from small-town North Carolina, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, grows into the singer Nina Simone — her sweet voice rising into a thunderous roar of protest during the Civil Rights Movement.
A quiet, piano-loving boy — the son of a man once enslaved — grows up to compose music so joyful and rhythmic it earns him a new name: the King of Ragtime.
A long-legged girl who dreams of ballet worries her too-big feet and outspoken mouth will hold her back, so she takes bold, attention-grabbing risks when a famous director visits her class.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
A real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
A boy in Punjab, born with weak legs that kept him from playing cricket or walking to school, grows stronger year by year on his family's farm and eventually runs marathons at over one hundred years old.
Three young rebels find each other while playing outside, and when a local lagoon dries up and traps a bird friend, they call on their ancestors to help.
