ALWAYS BEGINNING

A history of the universe, told multiple ways.

In Wada’s dramatically lit illustrations, an awed child of indeterminate ancestry holds a small, sparkling ball that bursts into starry, spread-filling swirls. The view then narrows from galaxies to a certain small planet’s violent beginnings. In time, early life appears, explodes into extravagant spiral rivers of more developed forms, and gives way at last to a final close-up of stars in the dazzled child’s eyes. Savage accompanies these images in swirling lines of equally lyrical commentary that focus less on specifics than the continuing and continual “strangeness & wonder” of it all, with “everything / everything / always beginning.” Then she retells the tale twice—once in an illustrated timeline with matter-of-fact annotations that begins with the Big Bang and ends with the appearance of modern humans about 300,000 years ago, and again in a straight prose account that connects the entire story to readers: “Everything that has happened,” she writes, “has led to YOU. The story of the universe is your story.” Despite the different emphases, the parts don’t really make up a whole; rather than build toward something, the sections seem largely repetitive. Still, some children may be carried away by the imaginative flight, and others will enjoy the info dump or the ego bolstering.

The parts are better than the whole, but the work deserves points for ambition.