Sizing Up

Whether we are conscientiously aware of it, we are comparing and contrasting throughout our day.  On multiple occasions we calculate how much time it will take to perform a given task and compare it to the time available.  We guesstimate measurements in rooms when decorating, in yards when landscaping, and in cooking meals with or without recipes.  When we are out and about, we gauge distances from one point to another, how close we are to the doe and fawn who suddenly makes an appearance or how high up the hawk is, gliding on an air current.

Sometimes on a clear night, with an overhead sky filled with stars, it is easy to wonder how something so far away looks as though you could reach up and gather a handful.  Your Place in the Universe (Neal Porter Books, Holiday House, September 1, 2020) written and illustrated by Jason Chin is a stellar title focusing on size, measurement, comparison, and distance.  We begin with our feet firmly planted on the ground and gaze outward into the universe.  

These kids are eight years old.

They are about five times as tall as this book,

but only half as tall as . . .

Before you turn the page to reveal the conclusion of the second sentence, in smaller print at the bottom you are told the number of inches tall the average eight-year-old is.  You are informed about the advantage of using inches in measuring.

We are further acquainted with the tallest bird in the world compared to the children.  This bird is then contrasted with the tallest land animal and the eight-year-olds.  New heights are explored when seeking the tallest living things and the tallest manmade structures which far exceeds those natural beings.

We move to majestic mountains and the tallest peak on our planet.  As we look up miles beyond mountains, we encounter portions of our atmosphere, the edge of space, and the thermosphere and exosphere which extends 6,200 miles 

above Earth's surface.

Comparisons are made to the distance to the International Space Station and the width of our planet.  Although the Earth is very wide it is not as wide as . . .

We journey farther and farther away from our home to those places we can see with our naked eyes and those places in our solar system not yet seen.  In all its vastness our solar system is smaller than the galaxy where it resides. Within this galaxy, The Milky Way, the number of stars is

more than 100 billion.

Do you know how long, even traveling at the speed of light, it will take you to reach the center of our galaxy?  Do you know how far away the nearest galaxy is to our Milky Way?  In a truly mind-boggling display of comparative wonder, galaxy groups are small against galaxy clusters which are small within the cosmic web and the universe as a whole.  In a brilliant use of words, we go from the 

observable universe

back to those four eight-year-old children who now know . . .

With every page turn your fascination grows due to the precise use of language and research of author Jason Chin.  Readers are completely engaged by the rhythmic pause in the narrative as we await what is taller, higher, wider, farther or larger than the previous thing being discussed.  With each expansion our marvel grows as he adds a new dimension to our thinking and the world we can see.  The fine print explanations along with the main narrative are informative and marvelous to ponder.  Here are two connected passages.

Earth is enormous, but it's not

so big compared to . . .

. . . the orbit of the Moon.

The Moon is 238,855 miles away from Earth.  It's so

far away that 29 Earths could fit between the two.  It's

so far that a jet plane going 500 miles per hour would

take 19 days to get there. 

You want to step into the setting shown on the front, right, of the open and matching dust jacket and book case.  It's easy to see yourself on a hill at night exploring the world with those four eight-year-old kids.  I love the diverse group featured.  The wash of sky with the cosmic light behind them creates a perfect atmosphere.  The title text is silver foil.

To the left, on the back, the necks and faces of an ostrich and a giraffe are shown watching the children.  These extend from the far-left side.  The landscape and skyscape span the spine and entire back.  The words on the back read:

Can you find your place

in the universe?

A hue between midnight blue and teal covers the opening and closing endpapers.  On the title page the children have arrived at the hill and are setting up their equipment.  It is still daylight.  On the dedication and verso page, they are almost finished putting the telescope together, leading into the first page.

These illustrations rendered 

using watercolor, gouache, and digital techniques

are as beautiful as the people, creatures, and worlds they depict.  The beings that are alive are highly animated.  Jason Chin accentuates his comparisons in the beginning by placing a monarch butterfly in the pages.  The butterfly gets smaller as the comparisons get bigger.

Careful readers will note the passage of time by watching the background, changing from daylight, to sundown, to dusk and the rising of a full moon.  Until we venture out into space, Jason Chin shows each contrasted thing in the picture with the next larger item.  The children, ostrich and giraffe are tiny next to the tallest living things.  These tallest living things are dwarfed by the manmade structures.  

Many of the illustrations are framed in white, others extend to the page edges.  The double-page pictures are dramatic, highlighting the grandeur of their portrayals.  There is a vertical, double-page picture requiring you to turn the book.

One of my many, many favorite illustrations is when the children, the ostrich, the giraffe and books are shown as the full moon rises behind them.  Against the darkening sky the ostrich is left of the telescope with a pile of books around it.  To the right of the telescope, the children are standing on each other's shoulders with the top child holding a copy of the book for the giraffe on the right to read.  The giraffe is looking a tad bit surprised.  Beneath the giraffe, so tiny as to almost be invisible, is the butterfly.

With each reading of Your Place in the Universe written and illustrated by Jason Chin, you will learn some new incredible fact about this remarkable world in which we live. The book is a fine, very fine, work of nonfiction.  At the close of the book are four pages of further information with Jason Chin's artwork discussing Beyond Human Scale, Earth And The Solar System, The Solar System and The Universe.  Do you know what A Goldilocks Planet is?  There is a final page with A Note From The Author, A Note On The Age Of The Universe, A Note On The Illustrations, and Selected Sources.  I can't imagine a personal or professional collection without a copy of this book.

To learn more about Jason Chin and his body of work, please visit his website by following the link attached to his name.  Jason Chin has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  At the publisher's website there is an event kit and an educator's guide.  You can get a glimpse of several interior images at Penguin Random House.  Please take a few moments to enjoy this video.

Update:  This title and its author illustrator are featured by author, reviewer, and blogger Julie Danielson at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast on November 29, 2020.

To view the other titles selected this week by participants in the 2020 Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge, visit Kid Lit Frenzy hosted by educator Alyson Beecher.

Lift Your Head And Look

When you step outside, depending on your reason for doing this, your senses are usually directed to something in particular.  Whether you remain in your own yard, city block or roam on country roads, you tend to look down, or to the left or right.  Unless a noisy flock of birds, curious cloud formation or startling sunrise or sunset grabs your attention, you usually tend to not look up.

The creative collaborative team giving readers, The Street Beneath My Feet, has returned in another brilliant endeavor.  The Skies Above My Eyes (Quarto Knows, August 28, 2018) written by Charlotte Guillain with illustrations by Yuval Zommer asks us to lift our eyes to the sky, note what we see and informs us of what lies beyond our natural sight.  We travel from the ground to beyond our solar system and back down.

As you go about your daily
life, there is so much going
on around you.  It's easy to
stop and stare at the sights in
the busy city street.  But how
often do you look upward?
So much more is going on in
the sky above you!

Let's take a look . . . 

First we are directed to notice all the street signs and signals giving us as drivers and pedestrians important information.  We can see small pieces of others' lives and workplaces by glancing in windows.  We appreciate the bravery of window washers scaling the side of towering buildings.  Next we take a trip to those able to fly.

Helicopters, airplanes, weather balloons and rockets soar; each having a purpose.  Did you know there's a line called the Karman line which marks the start of space?  Look!  There is the Soyuz capsule journeying toward the International Space Station.  We are now 250 miles above the Earth.  Astronauts and cosmonauts repair the space station by being tethered to the station.  If we go another 234,750 miles where will we be? 

Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on its surface.

Each of the other seven planets in our solar system orbits the sun.  They are all millions of miles from planet Earth.  Which planet has at least 62 moons?  Which planet has a single day as long as 243 Earth days?  If we travel higher than our solar system there are galaxies numbering beyond our imagination loaded with stars and planets. 

Moving back to Earth we pass through the familiar Milky Way galaxy as comets and asteroids traverse through space.  Different cloud formations produce varying kinds of weather.  Birds with special physical characteristics glide at astounding heights.  Have you ever heard of the Ruppell's griffon vulture?  Yikes!  What are those spiders doing three miles above the ground?

I wonder how close skydivers and hang gliders can get to bighorn sheep and bald eagles. As we drift back to terra firma our eyes still look higher than normal.  We see birds and butterflies who might originally escape our attention.  If we stay outside until dusk we might even see bats leaving trees to hunt for food.  Let's remember to look toward the skies and know and dream about what lies farther than we can fathom.


As our guide author Charlotte Guillain not only leads us upward (and back again) layer by layer but informs us with fascinating facts.  She encourages us to be aware, make observations and expand our thinking.  Using a conversational approach she includes requests and questions in the narrative.  It's as if we are together with her in a special vehicle experiencing everything she explains with her words.  Here are several passages about comets.

Look out!
Here comes a comet!

A comet is a massive
ball of frozen rock, ice, dust,
and gases, hurtling through
space.  When a comet gets close to
a star, it warms up and develops
its own atmosphere,
called a coma.

Dust and gases trail far behind the comet to form
a long tail that shines in the night sky.

Halley's Comet takes 76 years to orbit our Sun---
we should be able to see it from Earth again in 2061.


The first thing readers might do with The Skies Above My Eyes is run their hands over the opened book case.  They will discover on the right, front, embossed and raised portions.  Many of these are glazed or varnished, sparkling in the light.  The scene we see on the front crosses over the spine to the left, back.  We move from the city to snow-capped mountain peaks.  Swirling leaves, paper airplanes, bats, dandelions, and umbrellas, inside out, are replaced with high-flying birds, spacecraft, airplanes, more planets and wait . . . are those aliens?  The wide-eyed girl on the cover explores with us from the beginning to the end.

On the inside of the book case, on the left, is publication information, creator information and an introductory paragraph about the right side.  This right side depicts the planet Earth, troposphere, ozone layer, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and the Karman line.  On the left these layers are labeled in miles.  This diagram is framed in elements of art by Yuval seen throughout the book.  The background for most of this is black. 

Upon opening the cover we realize the design asks us to turn the book to view the pages, attached like an accordion, vertically.  Extending more than eight feet beyond the book case on both sides of sturdy, matte-finished paper, these images in full color are a stunning display of creative layout.    Illustrator Yuval Zommer continues his intricate, playful and enlightening artwork viewed on the case with every interior double-page illustration.

Each one demands we pause, captivated by the numerous details.  Cutaways welcome further inspection.  Every time this book is read new discoveries will be seen.  Is the cat on the roof ledge going to leap at the pigeons?  Is that a flying saucer? What does the owl see?  Yuval Zommer's visuals heighten this text but also urge us to dream of places beyond our own.

One of my many, many favorite illustrations is when we are descending back to the ground.  The text discusses a variety of clouds and birds.  The many shades of sky blue in the background provide an excellent canvas for the clouds and birds.  At the top, five miles above the Earth, darker clouds gather as whooper swans fly in v-formation through cirrus clouds.  Beneath these altocumulus and altostratus clouds dot the sky. Tiny snowflakes fall from these. Delicate spiders cascade near another flock of birds, white storks.  It's now raining in earnest and snowing.  We are at one mile.  This is a breathtaking portrait.


All readers will happily open The Skies Above My Eyes written by Charlotte Guillain with illustrations by Yuval Zommer repeatedly.  It increases our respect for the manner in which nature and the universe works.  Further research is embraced willingly with a title like The Skies Above My Eyes.  I highly recommended this book for your personal and professional book collections.

To learn more about Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer and their other work, please follow the links attached to their names to visit the appropriate sites. Both Charlotte and Yuval maintain accounts on Twitter. Yuval is on Instagram.

Be sure to visit Kit Lit Frenzy hosted by educator Alyson Beecher to enjoy the titles selected by others participating in the 2018 Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge.

Imagination..Exploration..Discovery

One of many good things about having a dog choose you, is the late night walks; especially when the sky is clear and filled with starry shapes familiar and unknown.  To see and identify those constellations learned at an early age, to watch the meteor showers, to wonder at the northern lights, and see the moon in all its phases, is magical.  It's a whole new world above and beyond our planet.

When I saw A Black Hole Is NOT a Hole (Charlesbridge Publishing, February 1, 2012) written by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano with illustrations by Michael Carroll appear on the 2012 Nerdy Book Club Award Nominees list this past December, it caught my attention. Like so many subjects the more you know, the more fascinating they become to you; almost like miracles because the realm in which they exist is so far out of your everyday life.  This title is a seventy-four page journey into a place no one can visit.


Have you heard the news?
In outer space, mysterious entities called black holes seem up to no good.

After an upbeat, conversational introduction seven chapters with headings, Places with Pull, The Pulling Power of a Black Hole, Black-Hole Beginnings, The Blackness of Black Holes, Mission Impossible? Seeking the Invisible, Supersized Surprises, Close Encounters of the Imaginary Kind and Turning the Universe Upside-Down, inform readers on the exact facts about these very real places.  Beneath each chapter title is a single statement which is supported and explained thoroughly within the following pages.

Chapters are broken into smaller sections of discussion by additional sentences or phrases.  Interspersed among the main narrative are insets coded in orange going in-depth about a particular topic such as Fact of the Matter (an explanation of the density in the center of a black hole), An Event What? (a definition of the outer area of a black hole known as the event horizon) or Sparking a Star (the reason a star shines) to name a few.  A variety of charts and drawings ranging in size from several pages to a smaller portion of a page visualize concepts for readers.

Every single two-page display has at least one if not more visuals.  Clever small black and white sketches in the margins had humor and interest.  Spectacular full color images from astronomical institutions give readers the feeling they may be at the very least in a planetarium if not zooming through space in a ship.


If you want to know why nothing ever comes out of a black hole this book is for you.  If you were ever curious about gravity and it's types of pulls this book is for you.  If you ever wanted to know what might need to end for a black hole to be formed this book is for you.  The complete absence of light, radiating X-rays, surprises in unexpected places, journeying in your mind and blankets (yes, blankets) all play a part in this amazing discourse.

The wit and meticulously researched wisdom of Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano is evident on every single page of this book.  As a reader you will be drawn into this volume from the onset not able to stop until you have absorbed all it has to offer; the language will appeal to and be understood by all of the intended audience.  Along with the black and white sketches previously mentioned are speech bubbles offering comical asides.  Here are a couple of passages from this title. (My copy looks like a porcupine; loaded with sticky notes)

Nothing can out-tug a black hole.  No army of tow trucks, no convoy of supersized earth haulers, no fleet of giant rocket engines.  Not all of them combined.
A black hole pulls in nearby dust.  It pulls in nearby asteroids.  It pulls in nearby stars and even nearby starlight.  And no light, stars, asteroids, or dust comes out.  Not ever.

In the star's center, the gas is so energized that it has become a sort of super gas, called plasma.  The hot plasma is in constant motion.  It expands like hot air inside a balloon and pushes outward from the center.  Meanwhile, the crushing weight of the star material continues to press inward.  In goes the outer material and out goes the inner.  The plasma rolls and churns like a hyper hurricane of heat, light, sound, and motion.


Breathtaking paintings rendered in acrylics by renowned illustrator, Michael Carroll elegantly enhance the text.  Color, detail, and design invite readers to step into the unknown, out of this world.  Evoking a sense of wonder, the mysterious unexplored, but staying true to the known, each articulates the essence of outer space and black holes.


Readers could not ask for a better book to introduce and expand their knowledge than A Black Hole Is NOT a Hole written by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano with illustrations by Michael Carroll.  A time line, glossary, written and online resources, image credits and an index are listed at the back of the book.  Of special interest is the two page author's note offering readers a glimpse into her process and the importance of accurate and thorough research. Here is a link to a interview at Kirkus, Debunking Black Holes For Kids.

Here is a link to an additional NASA page on black holes. This is the link to the HubbleSite: Black Holes: Gravity's Relentless Pull.  These two recent articles on black holes look interesting: Star Orbits Black Hole At Record-Breaking Speed For X-Ray Binary System, ESA Announces and Scientists Catch A Black Hole Munching On A Giant Planet.