YOU BELONG IN THIS WORLD

Peelen begins her wide-ranging, serene text with a list of ways to arrive on Earth: “Some sprout…Some clone…Some float on spores.” Readers next encounter a page busy with young animals, among them a penguin, ladybugs, sea turtles, and other oviparous creatures. “Some hatch,” Peelen notes, but “some are born”: A baby elephant lies at its mother’s feet; a joey gazes out from a pouch. And then an utterly idyllic scene appears: five diverse, dozing human babies swaddled, a wildflower horizon behind them, and in the foreground, the earnest declaration, “The Great Mystery sparked you. You belong in this world.” The book then returns to active, detailed illustrations capturing the diversity of life on Earth—seahorses bursting from “papa’s pot-belly,” jellyfish cloning themselves, plant seeds blowing on the breeze. The sincere, gentle tone of both images and verse feels refreshingly plucked from a different era. Eschewing the familiar cynicism of a world where climate destruction seems insurmountable, Peelen instead allows every generation of reader, from toddler to grandparent, a moment to marvel at the multitudinous, well-worth-nurturing miracle of life. A single-page scientific explanation of the featured images follows the softly flowing, largely self-explanatory text.