WE GO WAY BACK

A look back at the beginnings of life on Earth, capped by a populous double-gatefold family tree.

In a concise yet pithy, playful, and deeply insightful storyline that dovetails nicely with Karen Krossing’s One Tiny Bubble, illustrated by Dawn Lo (2022), Ben-Barak and Bunting begin by pointing out that despite diverse looks and likes, we all have one thing in common: life. And what is that? Following definitions proposed by a gallery of unidentified thinkers, including cartoon-style but recognizable versions of Darwin (“Self-reproduction with variation!”) and Spinoza (“A mechanism”), the scene shifts back to our planet’s early days to track the assembly of loose elements into complex molecules, then simple organisms that could make copies—each, moreover, “a Little Bit Different.” A “while” later (“Literally billions of years,” as a footnote explains), here we are…bursting into view on the climactic gatefold in teeming lines of developing flora and fauna that all, from single-celled prokaryotes at the bottom to a dark-skinned, shorts-wearing preteen near (not at) the top, share both life and slightly stunned expressions conveyed by googly pop eyes. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Sneakily cerebral for all its apparent simplicity.