The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie imagines a world where Marie Curie, driven by her scientific curiosity, conducts groundbreaking experiments that delve into the supernatural and unknown realms. When her experiments attract dangerous attention, Marie finds herself caught in a web of intrigue, espionage, and mystery, pushing the boundaries of science—and herself. The writing is suspenseful and immersive, blending historical detail with speculative elements. Marie Curie is depicted as a complex, fearless protagonist whose intellect and resilience shine through, creating a portrait of a woman whose ambitions lead her to uncover secrets beyond her time. The richly atmospheric setting captures the intrigue of early 20th-century Europe, where scientific breakthroughs clash with societal expectations and covert threats.

Themes of ambition, discovery, and the ethical dilemmas of science are explored in a way that resonates with modern questions around technology and morality. The blend of historical accuracy and imaginative storytelling creates a multi-layered experience that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie is an exciting and original take on historical fiction, merging science with suspense in a story that honors Curie’s legacy while exploring what might lie beyond it. Special thanks to NetGalley and to Blackstone Publishing for providing an Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review!

I loved this! The fun and imaginative twists inspired by Curie are great; these authors are sure to please!

I would like to thank Blackstone Publishing, NetGalley, and the authors for an advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

Read if you like:
Short Stories
Historical Fiction
Fantastical Twists

This collection of short stories centers on the brilliant Marie Curie as a young student. The authors take inspiration from her life and reimagine her as an up and coming young scientist who uses her brilliance to solve murders and fantastical mysteries.

As a woman in science I owe a lot to the women who blazed the trail for me to follow so I was excited to read this collection. The first few stories were interesting but the following stories felt really repetitive. While I did enjoy the glimpses of Marie's life as a young girl in Poland, I wish the authors had emphasized why she is so important historically. I love a story with fantasy elements but here the fantasy overshadowed the character to the point where the stories could have been about any young woman interested in science. Unfortunately, this collection was a miss for me.

A great little collection of stories by fabulous and well-known (to me) authors. I enjoyed this book but the cover is not very attractive so zi do not suspect it becoming popular with teens.

An Anthology of 16 short stories and poems created by authors of Speculative Fiction, THE HITHERTO SECRET EXPERIMENTS OF MARIE CURIE is truly Speculative in nature, relying not on the known facts of the life of this Scientific genius and dual Nobel Prize winner, but instead considering "what might have been" in Marie's early life, in a culture that discouraged females from education, let alone from pursuing Scientific endeavors.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

I knew little to nothing about Marie Curie, so this short story collection was a good gateway drug to start researching. I enjoyed them!

Thank you for providing a copy for review. I was very excited to pick this up as my career is in science. Unfortunately this felt like reading a textbook. I found it hard to be intrigued and to pay attention. I did not have enough power to finish it, but I might come back to it in the future.

This was a quick and delightful read! I'm sure a lot of science fans will fall in love with the writing and creativity of the authors. From the first story, Uncrowned Kings by Seanan McGuire, I was ALL IN. It's like learning a whole new language in addition to the one you already know, just so find out that it's even better. I'd pick this up over any book, any day. All in all, a very fun, light read.

It was a well written and absolutely amazing short story collection about Marie Curie!
I was skeptical at first but I enjoyed this one!

I was interested in this book so that I could teach my students a little about Marie Cutie. While there some stories that I liked, there were others that I did not. I hated that instead of science, it was mostly magic. I think should have been better as straight historical fiction and educational short stories rather than a fantasy anthology.

Probably closer to a 2.5 star. I thought that this was a fairly solid collection, and I love work that focuses on the history of female scientists. However, the almost RPF style and the general through line of making Marie Curie's life "magical" left a sort of bitter taste in my mouth, and I'm still not sure if all of it landed as well as it should have. I also felt like some of the stories got repetitive, and I would have like to see it cover a wider range of her life

These short stories were throughly enjoyable and offered a lot of fun ways to convery scientific information in a way that I feel students will find very engaging. As a science educator, I can see myself references or reading from this collection in the classroom.

There are some great short stories around Marie Curie in this anthology. I feel the need to search out other works by individual authors. If you like speculative historical fiction, definitely check this one out.

First off, this is an anthology of fictional stories and poems that are only loosely related to each other through the historical facts of Marie Curie's (Marya Skłodoska's) life. This leads straight into my major gripe; the stories, although not connected, are also not in chronological order. Marya will be 13 in one story, then 15 in the next, and 14 again in the following. She'll have graduated school in one story, then attending it again in the subsequent one. Sometimes she'll be attending the Flying University and then in the next chapter be listening to her father discuss how to start the Flying University. I'm not sure why the editors chose such a haphazard organizational system but it made the anthology more disjointed than necessary to me.

I was also expecting a wider range of time to be represented. These stories primarily cover Marya's childhood from about age 10 to age 15. I feel like her older teenage and early adult years could have also offered material for this project and given it a more diverse story set. As it was, a lot of the stories felt a bit repetitive since they followed the same basic story concept but simply changed up what "science" experiment was being done.

Following up on the "science" experiments: I was disappointed in this aspect. I was expecting more science and instead ended up with Polish magic and folktales. Some of this is absolutely to be expected, however I thought it would be more about Marya disproving such things or relating them to actual science as opposed to some of what actually happened in the stories. I did enjoy the "science notes" that some of the authors put at the end of their contributions.

I don't specifically recommend this as a whole, however some of the stories were worthwhile, like the one that took place in the Flying University where a student's skin turned blue. I also liked the message of the quasi-Frankenstein retelling story as well. On StoryGraph I gave this 2.5 stars but rounded up to 3 here.

I want to preface this review by saying YES to more books about women in STEM, historical and modern-day. I was excited to see this book on NetGalley because I know that ten-year-old me would have begged for it at the fifth-grade Scholastic book fair in 2004.

The stories in this book reimagine Marie Curie's life before she was the Marie Curie the world remembers today. Young Marie, or "Marya" as she was called by friends and family, gets up to a variety of hijinks as the youngest of five children and deals with the early loss of her mother and eldest sister to tuberculosis and typhus. I enjoyed the chance to see such a prominent historical figure as a child with more questions about the world than answers.

That being said, I don't know why many of these stories had to be about Marie Curie. In one, seemingly inspired by folklore, Marie befriends a monster under her bed. In others, she solves a murder, and in another, a missing persons case. I didn't understand the purpose of creating such wildly fictional stories about a real person. It felt like the authors wrote fun stories about young girls with interests in science and logic, and then copy-pasted in Marie's name.

As a girl who grew up inhaling Nancy Drew books like candy, I know there is an appetite for middle-grade mysteries. (I still read a fair bit of middle-grade literature today considering I'm a 28-year-old woman.) But making these mysteries and fairy tales star Marie Curie felt a bit... off, somehow. With much regret, I DNF'ed at 44%, but acknowledge I may be overthinking the purpose more than the average middle-grade reader.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Marie Curie is an under represented women of historical importance. These vignettes allow the reader to imagine and experience some of the world of this scientific researcher. This would be an amazing gift for young scientists and young women who are interested in reading more about their heroes.

Marie Curie is a fascinating historical figure, and this book is made up of fantastic science fiction stories about her in her youth. Many of them center on the loss of her mother and sister close together, others on different experiments she might have performed if magic were actually real, and about her experiences as a girl in Russian run gymnasiums.

I really enjoyed this book. The stories were all fascinating, my favorite being the one where young Marie (who is refered to by her Polish name Marya--she changed it later on in life) is confronted by a demon of sorts, a monster under her bed, who challenges her to not be afraid of him multiple times. Marya, a curious child, wins the bet despite all of the demon's terrible forms. Another excellent one finds a jealous rival of Marie's exchanging places with her, leaving Marie just a ghost who needs to figure out how to get her body back. I really enjoyed this book, and all of the stories in it.

The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie was a pretty enjoyable anthology that featured a lot of really great authors. If you love a good short story collection you will really enjoy this.

A very interesting collection of stories by talented authors. The life of Marie Curie is the basis of all the stories included here. They are imaginative on the whole, though all were not my cup of tea.
I was expecting realistic stories of how Curie could have been as a teen or a young woman, but what I found were stories involving Curie fighting werewolves, solving murders, and challenging ghosts, all before the age of 14.

Excellent writing but just not for me.

Thanks to @netgalley for the opportunity to read this eArc in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.