The his­to­ry of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy includes many hid­den or par­tial­ly obscured women. One such woman is Ros­alind Franklin, a pio­neer­ing chemist, X‑ray crys­tal­lo­g­ra­ph­er, and the sub­ject of this pic­ture book biog­ra­phy. ​“This sto­ry doesn’t real­ly have a hap­py end­ing,” author Tanya Lee Stone warns, because some­times peo­ple nev­er earn the recog­ni­tion they deserve. Stone then goes on to describe Franklin’s life, which was both trag­ic and inspiring.

Ros­alind Franklin (1920 – 1958) was born in Lon­don to a Jew­ish fam­i­ly with high expec­ta­tions for their chil­dren. Yet no amount of parental encour­age­ment could counter the prej­u­dices women faced when try­ing to enter careers in sci­ence. The author and illus­tra­tor paint Franklin as mul­ti­tal­ent­ed and enthu­si­as­tic about a wide range of endeav­ors. As a young girl, Franklin plays hock­ey, climbs moun­tains, and stud­ies lan­guages. She is ener­getic and beau­ti­ful, and sure of the path ahead.

In 1946, a few years after grad­u­at­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, Franklin accepts a research posi­tion in Paris, through which she becomes high­ly skilled at X‑ray crys­tal­log­ra­phy — a process that enables the visu­al­iza­tion of mat­ter at the atom­ic and mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el. While France seems more accept­ing of female sci­en­tists, Franklin returns to Eng­land to study DNA at King’s Col­lege. At this point, Franklin begins to con­front the obsta­cle of sex­ism. Joy­ous and excit­ing images of Franklin work­ing in her lab, rid­ing a bicy­cle, and even wear­ing a dress by Chris­t­ian Dior all change. Threat­ened by her bril­liance, her male col­leagues are deter­mined to exclude her from the search to unlock the genet­ic code with­in DNA.

In straight­for­ward lan­guage, Stone explains how male ​“mis­un­der­stand­ing,” whether will­ful or obtuse, effec­tive­ly mar­gin­al­ized Franklin from her team. Stand­ing back to back with lead DNA sci­en­tist Mau­rice Wilkins, who has his arms fold­ed in anger, Franklin is absorbed in a doc­u­ment marked with an atom­ic sym­bol. Their por­trait is framed by three pieces of lab glass­ware, and the cloud emerg­ing from them has the dou­ble mean­ing of sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion and pro­fes­sion­al fum­ing. Lat­er, Fran­cis Crick and James Wat­son hear Franklin’s pre­sen­ta­tion on X‑ray dif­frac­tion of DNA. Even­tu­al­ly, they con­spire to appro­pri­ate Franklin’s data, ulti­mate­ly using it to pro­duce a mod­el of DNA’s dou­ble helix. Crick and Wat­son are depict­ed stand­ing togeth­er, their shad­ows loom­ing next to them in tri­umph. Franklin exits the scene, fol­low­ing her own shad­ow off the page.

This high­ly rec­om­mend­ed book empha­sizes a bru­tal real­i­ty about adults who, rather than work­ing in coop­er­a­tion and toward progress, suc­cumb to pet­ty motives. In his mem­oir, Wat­son wrote about Franklin with such obvi­ous arro­gance that schol­ars were moti­vat­ed to unearth the truth about her life. Now young read­ers can access Franklin’s coura­geous sto­ry in this dis­tin­guished pic­ture book.