My Mastodon

Illustrated by Antonio Marinoni

2021 Oklahoma Book Award Winner

A “Great Reads from Great Places” Book for the 2021 National Book Festival of the Library of Congress

Kirkus Starred Review

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/barbara-lowell/my-mastodon/

Accomplished illustrations further elevate this engaging introduction to America’s first family of science — Kirkus Starred Review

It’s a sweet and remarkable story, with Marionini’s exquisite illustrations inviting the reader directly into the Peales’ museum home, a world of taxidermic animals and towering skeletons — Booklist Review

Nurtured by intelligent eccentric family members and permitted familiarity with priceless scientific curiosities, Sybilla has an ideal Enlightenment-era childhood — Publishers Weekly

Creative Editions/The Creative Company https://www.thecreativecompany.us

Inspired by the 19th century lives of artist and scientist Charles Willson Peale’s family, this is a tale of his daughter Sybilla and her favorite companion — a fossilized mastodon. 

I have always loved visiting natural history museums. My favorite is the Museum of Natural History in New York City. When I learned that Sybilla Peale lived in one, I knew I had to write a story about her.

American Mastodon at La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles

ISBN: 978-1568463278

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Crisis looms when young Sybilla Peale learns that big brother Rembrandt is taking a beloved fossil for a tour of England.

Sybilla is accustomed to living among the wildlife exhibits (“They are very well behaved. They’re stuffed”) that fill the natural history museum set up in their home by Rembrandt and their father, Charles Willson Peale. She is understandably infuriated at the news that the “magnificent!” fossil skeleton beneath which she holds her doll tea parties will be leaving. Her rebellion melts away, though, when Rembrandt actually bows to her wishes. “Even if he is bossy, he is my brother,” she reflects, and rather than force him to leave the mastodon behind she lets the bones themselves decide. Marinoni illustrates this fictional episode in the life of the multitalented Peales with painterly views of a small, blonde spark plug confidently at home amid her all-white clan, exactly rendered early-American art and furnishings…not to mention all sorts of birds, insects, fossils, and other specimens. The scale of the mastodon skeleton relative to Sybilla is jaw-dropping, emphasized in image after image. Occasional outbreaks of elegantly set italics add an appropriately antique flavor to Sybilla’s narrative, and the author adds a pair of well-chosen period illustrations to an admiring explanatory afterword.

Accomplished illustrations further elevate this engaging introduction to America’s first family of science. (Picture book. 7-9) Kirkus Reviews