THE BIG BANG BOOK

An astrophysicist goes back to our cosmic origins: “Once upon a time, / we don’t know.”

“Maybe it was dark. / Maybe there was nothing.” Carefully distinguishing verifiable fact from informed speculation, Stahl ushers readers past the first second of the Big Bang through the transformation of plasma to matter, then the appearance of swirling galaxies and their stars and planets, and finally to a planet that’s “just right” for “you. / And everyone else.” In her suitably dramatic illustrations, Allen-Fletcher modulates from flat black pages to shimmering blasts of light and fiery stellar nurseries that give way to a misty blue Earth, with an indistinct figure in a dim bedroom scene hung with glow-in-the-dark stars—and, accompanying the author’s suggestion that there may be more than one planet that’s “just right,” a pointy eared silhouette likewise looking up into a starlit sky. Unlike James Carter’s similarly wonder-infused Once Upon a Star, illustrated by Mar Hernández (2018), the dizzying notion that the Big Bang marked the beginnings of time and space themselves as well as matter goes unremarked here…but in an expansive afterword the author urges readers to ask big questions like “What am I?” and “Where am I?” because they “cut to the heart of how much we understand about the universe.”

A stately recap drawing on current physics and astronomy and appropriately cognizant of their limitations.