The Dragon in the Cliff: A Novel Based on the Life of Mary Anning

by Sheila Cole, T. C. Farrow (Illustrator)

Overview

"I scraped off the wet clay with mounting excitement. There was no mistaking what I saw.”
 
What Mary Anning found in the cliffs in 1811, when she was 13, was the first complete fossil of an ichthyosaurus, a marine dinosaur. She hunted and sold fossils to save her family from poverty after her father died when she was 11 years old. Despite social disapproval of her unfeminine occupation, Mary persisted and became a leading fossilist who made valuable contributions to science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504033015
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	1,121,518
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	9 - 14 Years

About the Author

Sheila Cole is the author of To Be Young in America, The Dragon in the Cliff, and What Kind of Love? among other titles for both children and adults. She lives in Solana Beach, California.

Editorial Reviews

"Mary shines through as a spunky and believable heroine.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

Gr 5-9-- Mary Anning is the perfect subject for a children's biography, for she was only 13 when, in 1811, she became the first person to discover the fossil of an entire marine dinosaur. Cole does a wonderful job of describing Anning's struggles to overcome the biases of the times, the English town in which she lived, and its prejudices. Anning always had to fight to win the approval of both her parents and the gossipy townspeople, who thought it improper for a young girl to spend her days fossil hunting at the beach. While Cole's facts sometimes differ from the accounts in Fradin's Remarkable Children: Twenty Who Made History (Little, 1987), she also mentions that much of the information on her subject was sketchy, nonexistent, or false. Her novel is entirely believable, and her sensitivity to Anning's plight can't help but remind readers that it wasn't so long ago that women had little say as to the direction of their own lives. Children will identify with Anning's struggles with friends, family, and the ever-present poverty, but by including the societal instigators of her many problems--classism and sexism--Cole refuses to write down to her audience, or to simplify history. She presents here not only the effects, but also the historical causes, and for that she should be commended. --Cathryn A. Camper, Minneapolis Public Library

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