The rosy periwinkle provides a HIGHLY effective treatment for childhood leukemia. I read this and thought, “What?! How did I miss this? Leukemia has been CURED?! This is HUGE!”
It flat out says that chemicals from the rosy periwinkle provide a cure for leukemia. And this book has been reviewed by the big ones - Kirkus. I have spent far too much time looking into this, and there is not a single review that I can find that mentions this, in my opinion, error. This is a quote from the book: "Chemicals from the rosy periwinkle, found in Madagascar, provide a cure for leukemia." Tell me if I am being too nitpicky, because this is REALLY bothering me.
That quote is Lang's lovely text, which lands on this spread among colorful and sketchy images of Meg observing, collecting, preserving, and viewing her own backyard leaves from an eye-level tree house, all of which foreshadow the life she would eventually lead. The page turn then draws readers into Meg as a child, a painfully shy, studious girl who "wrapped herself in nature like a soft blanket". What child can't identify with that feeling? In this case, Lang's opening spread plants adult Meg at the base of a towering rainforest canopy tree with a sense of her pent up frustration about finding a way "UP". It's a tricky challenge for a biographer to engage young readers with the adult lifestory of noteworthy folks, with many authors following a cradle-to-grave sequence, launching the "hook" of the childhood years on the first page.
In the case of this first spread, Meg has spent two decades focused on leaves: thinking, reading studying, researching, hypothesizing about rainforest canopy leaves and ecosystems, but frustrated that no one had ever reached that biome directly. With that quotation and nickname as my introduction to this pioneering rainforest scientist, the author follows with a full spread that anchors a pattern of three things I especially enjoyed and admired: revealing Meg's emotional inner life, including a significant quotation that summarizes specific elements of her biography, and brief science information displayed on a lower corner "leaf" inset on most pages.
"We are PART of our ecosystem, not outside it." It's hard for me to imagine anyone who is not a fan of the rainforest, and anyone who doesn't have a strong impulse toward both curiosity and concern when that subject is mentioned.īefore the main text begins, a quotation by Margaret "Canopy Meg: Lowman is showcased on its own page:
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