As a child, Mary Nohl helped her father build a house along the shore of Lake Michigan just north of Milwaukee and was “happiest when her hands were busy making, building, creating things.” Mary grew up to travel all over the world and was captivated by the art in the places she visited. When she came back home to the house she’d helped build, she began to collect found objects on the beach, with the help of her dogs Sassafras and Basil. The things she gathered were part of something bigger—a creature she could see her in imagination. From cement, supports, and “odds and ends, bits and bobs,” a “magnificent creature” emerged in her yard. Wisconsin natives Tina and Carson Kügler introduce young children to one dimension of this unusual and brilliant artist’s immense creative outpouring in this engaging picture book. A note provides additional information about Nohl’s extraordinary art—her home and her yard were her canvas—and efforts to preserve it. (Ages 4–8)