Drawing at random from a bowl her teacher has filled with slips of paper, Gina selects the topic for her upcoming science project: “Advanced Technology in Our Everyday Lives.” So begins this book, third in a series (following The Science Book for Girls and The Math Book for Girls) that aims to present to girls and young women high-tech, empirically based subjects that have traditionally been of interest mostly to boys. Following Gina through her science project research, author Trudee Romanek of Barrie, Ontario, looks at a huge range of technological applications, from laser surgery on teeth, to how CDs record, to the theory behind global positioning satellites. Gina’s daily life is filled with encounters with technology, and the narrative, excellently depicted by Toronto illustrator Pat Cupples, revolves around the explanations that friends and adults give on the way things work. Alongside Gina’s story, sidebars explain the inner workings of things and present easy experiments to explain key principles.

Although there’s nothing in the book’s experiments or explanations of technical subjects that’s particularly girlish (remote control systems open garage doors, regardless of your gender, after all), one of the ways in which the book is geared to a young female audience is in the profiles of women who have had successful careers in the high-tech field. Romanek has profiled women like California fibre-optics engineer Terri Dixon, Toronto radio-frequency inspector Joanne McCourt, and Australian physics professor Judith Dawes as a way of illustrating how an early interest in science can lead to a life spent in technology later on.