On Admiral Robert E. Peary’s second Arctic expedition to try to reach the North Pole, his wife, Josephine, gave birth to a baby girl in Greenland. She was named Marie Ahnighito Peary, but to many she was known as “The Snow Baby.” Katherine Kirkpatrick tells the fascinating story of Marie’s childhood in a volume illustrated with captivating black-and-white photographs. Through age eight, Marie and her mother continued to spend time in the Arctic with Peary on his journeys, retuning to the United States between ventures. She was at home on board a ship or on the frozen tundra, where her playmates were Inuit children. But by the time she was nine, she and her mother were living in Maine year-round, a change that young Marie seemed to take in stride. Marie was a young woman in 1909 when her father became the first to reach the Pole (an accomplishment that was quickly challenged but ultimately upheld). And she was almost forty when she finally returned to the land that was her very first home. Kirkpatrick’s account draws on numerous primary sources, including the writings of Marie Peary and her mother, as it tells the story of a privileged child’s unusual early life, and the journeys that made her father famous. (Ages 9–12)

Born in a two-room, tar-paper-covered house in the far north of Greenland, Marie Ahnighito Peary was destined to have an exciting childhood. Her parents, the famous explorer Robert E. Peary and Josephine Peary, had shocked Victorian society by starting their family so far away from "civilization." Fair-skinned children were so rare in the far North that the local Inuit called Marie "Snow Baby." Map, time line, bibliography, index.

A Booklist Editors' Choice Book
A Booklist Top 10 Biography for Youth
An Orbis Pictus Award Recommended Title
A Cooperative Children's Book Center Choice Book
A James Madison Book Award Honor Book