The Spider Lady: Nan Songer and Her Arachnid World War II Army
by Penny Parker Klostermann; illus. by Anne Lambelet
48 pages; ages 7-10
Calkins Creek, 2025
This book had me with the title: The Spider Lady. I mean… who wouldn’t want to know more? Especially with the subtitle mentioning an “arachnid WWII army.”
Like other entomologists, Nan Songer loved nature. In her case, it was butterflies and moths, beetles and caterpillars – even spiders. She loved learning about them, but didn’t love the idea of killing them and mounting them in collection boxes. Instead, Nan wanted to watch them move about, and she wrote down notes about what she discovered.
Her living insect collection grew, and soon she had jars of bugs all over her house. One day a friend told her that he had used spider’s silk to replace the crosshairs in his surveying scope. And that got Nan wondering… could she harvest spider silk and sell it?
Penny Parker Klostermann takes us right into Nan’s lab – ok, it was probably her dining room – where Nan is experimenting with different ways to collect silk. Nan has lots of questions: Which spiders produce the most silk? What size of silk is best? And most importantly, what’s the best way to raise spiders in captivity? Because some of them would definitely eat their roommates!
These were important questions, because World War II had broken out and the US needed silk for crosshairs in gunsights, periscopes, and range finders. And Nan wanted to furnish that silk.
We watch as Nan realizes that raising thousands of spiders means feeding them. And they like to eat crickets and flies, grubs and moths… and that means MORE jars of bugs! Her seemingly simple idea – to collect spider silk for crosshairs in scopes – began to grow into a huge project.
I love how Penny shows Nan thinking through the research she needs to do. How can she test whether noise affects the quality of silk produced? Does the age of a spider affect the thickness of the silk strand? And how could she obtain threads that were thinner or thicker than what a spider spun? Fortunately, she figured out how and by the time the US entered the war, Nan and her spiders were busy helping the troops.
You can find out more about Penny and her book by dropping over to the
GROG where, last month I hosted the 5th Annual Arthropod Roundtable.
Thanks for dropping by today. On Monday we'll be hanging out at Marvelous Middle Grade Monday with other bloggers. It's over at Greg Pattridge's blog,
Always in the Middle, so hop over to see what other people are reading.
Review copy provided by the publishers.
