Additional information
by Linda Soules (Author)
WINNER - 2026 Purple Dragonfly Book Award (1st Place), STEM
RECIPIENT of the Mom's Choice Award(R) Gold - Honoring Excellence
NAMED 2026 Book of the Year by Creative Child Magazine
WINNER of the Literary Titan Gold Book Award
From the So You Want To Be A... Series - 2026 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards, Grand Prize Winner
The ride lasts ninety seconds. The work behind it lasted seven years.
Before the first rider screams, before the first chain pulls the first car to the top of the first hill, someone spent years doing the mathematics of fear: calculating exactly how fast, how steep, how inverted, and how long, so the experience lands in the precise space between terrifying and safe. That calculation is not an accident. It is engineering at its most thrillingly human.
This book takes readers ages 10-14 inside one of the most imaginative and technically demanding careers there is, and not the theme park guest version. It covers the years of physics, materials science, and computer modeling that happen before a single piece of track is laid, and the discipline of designing for the human body, its limits and thresholds and capacity for adrenaline, with the precision of a surgeon and the imagination of a storyteller.
Roller coasters don't just appear. They are built by teams of structural engineers, ride mechanics, safety specialists, and experience designers working in careful coordination so that ninety seconds feels like nothing else.
Kids fascinated by how things work will find the physics of g-forces and kinetic energy that make speed feel exactly right, the computer simulations run thousands of times before a single bolt is tightened, and the materials engineering behind track and structure that must perform flawlessly under millions of cycles of stress. This is STEM brought to life in the most visceral way imaginable.
It is also a book about creative vision: turning a mathematical model into an experience that makes people laugh, scream, and immediately want to ride again. It is honest about what the work costs, what it gives back, and why the people who design roller coasters say they have the best job anywhere and mean it completely.
Inside, young readers will follow a designer's process from concept sketch to opening day. They will explore the science of thrills. They will learn why safety engineering is the most creative constraint of all, dig into the history of coasters and the legendary designers who turned a wooden hill into one of humanity's great inventions, and find out what they can do right now to discover if this career might be their calling.
For the kid who rides the coaster once for the thrill and once to figure out how it works. For the kid who builds things, takes things apart, and wonders how the wildest rides stay on the track.
The greatest roller coaster ever built does not exist yet. Someone has to design it.
