THE STORY OF EVERYTHING

Inspired by Debra Frasier’s On the Day You Were Born (1991), a tale that intertwines facts about Earth’s origins with the trajectory of childhood development.

As a Brown caregiver hikes and camps with a child sporting toy wings (whose white hair and pale skin suggest albinism), Newhouse’s text relies on a “before you were born” trope, previously popularized by Frasier, to gallop through billions of years of earth science. “Long before you grew cell by cell… / continents formed, / sulfur steamed, / bacteria multiplied, / life evolved on Earth.” The narrative aligns the child’s developmental markers with our planet’s evolutionary patterns. “Long before you took your first steps… / amphibians crawled and hopped to land.” After establishing the existence of bees, mammals, and dinosaurs, Newhouse introduces the giant asteroid whose impact (“BOOM!”) renders the dinosaurs extinct. Life renews, primates clamber in trees, and brown-skinned early humans start to “build, create, and play.” Cosgrove’s digital illustrations effectively use scraggly crayon textures against backdrops of deep-space black and the blue and mauve of earthly skies. Keyed to the child’s hair, chalk-white drawings depict evolving animal species and human achievements like ships and cities. The evolutionary narrative underpins a loving contemporary family; in one spread, a blissful pregnant couple awaits the birth of the youngster at the story’s center. Below a night sky whose starry constellation resembles the child’s face, the caregiver tucks the little one in. Little readers will come away assured of their place in the world.

Both tenderly human and macrocosmic.