CONSTELLATIONS

Boiling down content from his more comprehensive Constellations: Stars and Stories (2001), Sasaki presents scattershot references to mythological tales from various cultures associated with 11 constellations, which are depicted in heavily mannered portraits festooned with jagged, fingernail-sized, un-labeled glow-in-the-dark stars. Like nature, Flinn abhors a vacuum, filling background star fields with abstract swirls, spirals, color changes and geometric shapes around puppet-like figures that range from a charging Taurus to lounging representations of Andromeda and Cassiopeia. Though closing with a trio of doable craft projects, this is more a novelty item than a useful guide to the storied heavens—and in a darkened room less like the real thing than the illustrations in C.E. Thompson’s Glow In The Dark Constellations: A Field Guide For Young Stargazers (1989) or Nicholas Harris’s Glow In The Dark Book Of Space (2002). (Nonfiction. 7-9)