IF PLUTO WAS A PEA

This first picture book by novelist Prendergast (Pandas on the East Side, 2016, etc.) explains the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system.

Two children camp out in a backyard, a black child with cornrows and afro puffs and a white child with freckles and glasses. Armed with a book about the solar system, they explore Pluto’s status as a dwarf planet by using the refrain “if Pluto was a pea” as a point of comparison. Each spread compares a pea-sized Pluto to another object in the solar system. “The sun would be a tent”; “Mercury would be a marble”; etc. The final comparison is to smaller objects—Pluto’s three moons. On each spread, the newly named object appears, sometimes with the last object or a pea in the picture too. In the digital illustrations, the background alternates among the night sky, the inside of the tent, and simple white space; the last unfortunately detracts from the cohesive feeling of the story as a cozy campout. An effort is made to keep the objects in proper proportion; this is not always the case though, and the inconsistency can cause confusion. Both metric and English measurements are given for each item for the mathematically minded; as the text is stolidly repetitive, it’s hard to imagine other sorts of readers for it.

A good idea with execution that leaves much to be desired.