Amy Alznauer on The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

In this post, we feature author Amy Alznauer, whose previous titles include The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity, which was named a Book Links magazine Lasting Connections selection, among other honors. You can hear her speak about her new picture book, The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape, illustrated by Anna Bron. You can also try her “invitation to imagine” activity and find other resources to explore. Thanks for joining us, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

Written by Amy Alznauer and illustrated by Anna Bron
Published by Candlewick Press
Release date: March 4, 2025

When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old “problem of five” (why pentagons don’t fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn’t possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son’s copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn’t she? Marjorie studied, drew, and at last, she’d done it! She went on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations. This visually wondrous tribute radiates the thrill of one woman’s discovery and playfully inviting readers to approach geometry through art—and art through geometry. Back matter offers more on the story of five and suggestions on how to discover a shape.

An interior spread from The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice. On the left-hand page, a young Marjorie Rice notices mathematical patterns in nature, in a snail shell, a fern, a flower's petals, and more. On the right-hand page, ancient Islamic artists experiment with five-sided tiles to create beautiful mosaics.

An interior spread from The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice showing a crowd celebrating an adult Marjorie Rice, who smiles in a crowd.

Explore The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

Listen to Amy Alznauer talking with TeachingBooks about creating The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape. You can click the player below or experience the recording on TeachingBooks, where you can read along as you listen, and also translate the text to another language.

Invitation to Imagine

TeachingBooks asks each author or illustrator on our Virtual Book Tour to share a writing prompt, a drawing exercise, or just an interesting question to spark curiosity and creativity. Enjoy the following activity contributed by Amy Alznauer.

Imagination Activity with Amy Alznauer

The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape is about patterns that are created by a single shape, so here’s how you can do it yourself:

Draw a triangle—any triangle at all no matter how skinny or wide—on a piece of heavy paper or poster board.
Cut out your triangle.
Now, trace your triangle again and again, fitting each new copy together with the ones you’ve already drawn so that it makes a pattern with no gaps or overlaps.

The pattern you create might look like one of these—but ALL triangles work:

5 different images showing tesselated triangle patterns.

Now, repeat these steps for a four-sided shape. Squares and rectangles are the most common, but any four-sided shape, as long as its sides are straight, and it is closed, will also tile or tesselate—meaning you can fit it together with copies of itself with no gaps or overlaps.

Finish This Sentence . . . with Amy Alznauer

As part of our Virtual Book Tour, TeachingBooks asks authors and illustrators to complete short sentence prompts. Enjoy Amy Alznauer’s response.

“I hope that my book may encourage young people to think about…”

I hope that my book may encourage you (the kid who is reading my book) to take seriously what your mind likes to think about. The things you care about when you’re six or eight or ten, the things that really excite you, are going to matter to you for the rest of your life. So, pay attention to what you are right now. Write about or sketch your interests in a notebook. Ask questions and read books about what fascinates you. Bravely experiment in the direction of what you love!

“Where I work is…”

The desk where I work really matters to me but it doesn’t have to be pretty or neat (I’ve had my desk in laundry and furnace rooms and in tiny closets). It just has to be wide, with lots of room for books and paper, and set against a wall, so I won’t spend all my time looking out the window, and there has to be coffee, a printer, and music nearby. Here’s where I’m working now (can you find all the things I mentioned?):

Amy Alznauer's desk featuring art, a cup of coffee, books, a laptop, and journals.

Thank you!

To wrap up this Virtual Book Tour, we thank Amy Alznauer for signing a book for all of us.

The title page of The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice, signed by the author, Amy Alznauer, with the message, "What will you discover?"

More Connections to Amy Alznauer and The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape

Explore all of the titles featured in the TeachingBooks Virtual Book Tour: one link with author interviews, lesson plans, activities, and more!

All text and images are courtesy of Amy Alznauer, Anna Bron, and Candlewick Press and may not be used without expressed written consent.