In the 1830s, Jeanne Villepreux-Power’s groundbreaking work in what we now call the field of marine biology included inventing the precursor of the modern-day aquarium so she could study live animals in captivity, rather than dead specimens. She further refined her invention to observe marine animals in their natural habitats—unheard of at the time. The French-born, self-taught scientist’s research off the coast of Sicily, where she lived, focused on argonauts, a type of octopus that travels with a shell. Villepreux-Power proved that argonauts not only create their own shells but can repair them; she also identified the male of the species for the first time. At a time when the world of science was largely a world of men, many of whom didn’t think women had the intelligence or rigor for science, Villepreux-Power shared and sought credit for her work. When much of her documentation and research was lost in a shipwreck, she set about recreating it. It’s not just Villepreux-Power’s extraordinary character and scientific work that makes this engaging book stand out; it’s also the author’s seamless integration of our 21st-century understanding of gender and class (noting, for example, that Villeproux-Power was a women of economic privilege once she married) and her contrasting of scientific practices of the time with modern standards. Even the author’s research and writing methods are discussed up front, rather than solely in an author’s note, in this exemplary work of nonfiction. The lively narrative includes engaging, informative sidebars. (Age 11 and older)

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how of the argonaut octopus gets its shell.

In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them—the aquarium. Her remarkable life story is told by author, marine biologist, and octopus enthusiast Danna Staaf.