SCRATCHING THE SURFACE

What lurks deep within the Earth, beneath our feet?

As two children—one brown-skinned, one pale-skinned—build a sand castle by the shore, Fox peppers readers with questions (“What’s inside our planet?” “Why do volcanoes form and continents shift?”), then invites them to look for answers: “Let’s explore.” Her calm, lyrical text is both poetic and practical. The crust is “where worms wriggle and writhe,” but miles down, the temperature is “twice as hot as an oven baking cookies.” Though the unseen narrator references both Mt. Everest and Russia’s Kola Borehole, most scenes are set so far below the surface that they could be anywhere on the globe. The author injects the text with small doses of geology such as brief explanations of temperature and pressure, plate tectonics, what scientists can learn from earthquakes, and the astonishing life-giving function of the inner core. Fox’s praise of “the great thing about science” shades into a bigger observation: “We learn and we guess and we try and we fail and we try again. We hope to be right more often than we’re wrong. It’s a lot like being human.” Brown’s illustrations use bold, imaginative compositions, with cutaways, fluid lines, and vibrant, varied color to add drama as she switches from scenes of people exploring the world aboveground and the hidden world deep below.

Scratches young geologists’ itch for knowledge.