A Curious Mind and a Very Big Heart: The Story of Designer and Innovator Sara Little Turnbull

by Aura Lewis, Aura Lewis (Illustrator)

Overview

Meet the girl with a big heart and a bigger imagination who grew up to be an innovative international designer in this illuminating nonfiction picture book biography.

Sara Little Turnbull was a curious child. Her creativity and curiosity led her to the world of design, a world of imagining, planning, and making useful—and beautiful—things. She grew up to become an acclaimed innovator whose creative and celebrated design solutions spanned the gamut from housewares and furniture to toys, finger foods, cake mixes, textiles, spacesuits—and to a new medical mask, which inspired the design for the masks we wear today.

Sometimes Sara’s work was a tricky puzzle, and sometimes her ideas did not pan out like she’d planned, but she stuck with it, always hoping her designs would make the world a little bit better.

And...they did!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665904452
Publisher:	Beach Lane Books
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	1,146,056
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.50(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	AD760L (what's this?)
Age Range:	5 - 8 Years

About the Author

Aura Lewis studied design at Parsons School of Design as well as illustration at the School of Visual Arts. She is inspired by fashion, playful color, vintage design, and popular culture, and her work is featured on stationery, in ad campaigns and editorial publications, and in books for adults and children, including A Curious Mind and A Very Big Heart, The Illustrated Feminist, and We the People. Aura loves to travel the world, and so far, she has lived on four continents. You can find her work at AuraLewis.com.

Aura Lewis studied design at Parsons School of Design as well as illustration at the School of Visual Arts. She is inspired by fashion, playful color, vintage design, and popular culture, and her work is featured on stationery, in ad campaigns and editorial publications, and in books for adults and children, including A Curious Mind and A Very Big Heart, The Illustrated Feminist, and We the People. Aura loves to travel the world, and so far, she has lived on four continents. You can find her work at AuraLewis.com.

Editorial Reviews

10/09/2023

The N95 mask that became a part of daily life for many during the Covid-19 pandemic has its origins in an invention by industrial design pioneer Sara Little Turnbull (1917–2015). Attentive text from Lewis (Can Sophie Change the World?) notes the way Turnbull started life “looking carefully” at things while at museums and at home with her mother: “The delicate shape of an egg./ The iridescent skin of a purple onion.” As her curiosity leads her to study design, stylish editorial spot art shows how she becomes the brains behind cake mixes, ready-to-go gift ribbons, and an inspiration-related method of ideation: watching a cheetah gripping its prey in Kenya gives her the idea for a pot lid, and observing cumbersome hospital masks suggests to her room for improvement. In a breezy bio that’s as much about the figure’s tenacity as it is about her powers of insight, one playful illustration shows her threading her way through a maze—symbolic of a knotty problem—that eventually leaves her confounded. But Turnbull always persisted, reminding herself that “if you don’t stretch, you don’t know where the edge is.” An afterword concludes. Ages 5–8. Agent: Anne Moore Armstrong, Bright Agency. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2023-04-12
A habit of careful observation led to the design of today’s N95 medical masks.

Born in 1917 in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish parents, Sara Little Turnbull (nee Finkelstein) paid close attention to small details, like the skin of an onion or the shape of an egg. Working as an editor for House Beautiful and a product designer, she traveled the world for inspiration. Noticing the unwieldy medical masks in the hospital where her sister was being treated for cancer in the 1940s, she designed an alternative that in 1995 was developed into the N95 mask. Lewis makes this fact the climax for an appealingly illustrated but cursory biography. Readers might be intrigued by examples of Turnbull’s creations, such as an upside-down watch pinned to her shirt, “light-as-air space suits,” “good-for-kids sweets,” and a more functional pot lid inspired by a cheetah’s grip on its prey. But they will have to look elsewhere to learn that the pot was part of the ubiquitous CorningWare. Well-composed visuals make vibrant use of texture, elegantly set against white backdrops. One spread highlights an inspirational poster that the writer explains is “a reminder that mistakes can help you grow,” though a more specific example of mistakes in Turnbull’s life would have helped readers understand her mindset, as quoted in backmatter: “Ninety percent of my career was made up of failure, but failure is not defeat….” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Slight and sketchy. (sources and further reading) (Picture-book biography. 5-9)

Kirkus Reviews