Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became An Inventor, by Emily Arnold McCully

As a child, Mattie Knight loved to play with tools and invent toys and other useful devices for her brothers and widowed mother. Her mechanical abilities and perseverance also led to other inventions most notably a machine to produce square-bottomed paper bags. The story underscores the difficulties the inventor faced as a woman as well as her ingenuity and perseverance. Watercolor illustrations and small sketches of many of the inventions further illuminate the text.