THROUGH THE TELESCOPE

In Chicago there lives a girl named Mae whose sights are set on the stars.

Mae Jemison peers through a telescope and wonders about outer space. Her dreams take her floating past passenger jets and through the stratosphere until she’s suspended in space among the universe’s estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies. She perches on a shooting star and rides it as far as a light-year, which she calculates is about six trillion miles. Reflected in the telescope’s lens, Mae sees her future self: a bold astronaut on a daring spacewalk. Backmatter highlights many of Mae’s accomplishments in bite-size blurbs, including her groundbreaking achievement of becoming the first Black female astronaut to travel into space. Smith’s story is fueled by rhyming verse whose rhythm is sometimes unsteady, making for a choppy read-aloud in spite of several very well-paced moments. Monteiro has rendered their eye-catching digital illustrations in a limited palette of the blacks, blues, and gleaming yellows of deep space, balancing futurism and whimsy. Not so much a biography as a snapshot of one curious girl’s astronomical wonder, this book leans more on space facts than on Mae’s life, so readers curious about the trailblazer herself will need to search elsewhere.

A dreamy tale of space flight to set aspiring astronauts’ minds whirling.