Gravity

Starred review from January 27, 2014
Chin (Island) takes his exceptional artistic gifts into outer space, painting with disciplined exuberance a series of spreads that explain the fundamentals of gravity. A boy playing at the beach is startled when a book—a copy of this book, alert readers will note—falls from the sky and lands in front of him. The all-caps text reads like a series of booming declarations: “Without gravity, everything would float away.” On cue, the boy, his spaceman doll and rocket, and the very grains of sand on the beach lift slowly off the ground. The next page shows the whole lot drifting upward like a tide of debris into space. Chin does some David Wiesner–style visual punning as the pages of the boy’s book—illustrated with paintings of a massive, fiery sun exerting force on a tiny Earth and moon—do double duty as both an object affected by gravity and an explanation of how it works. In his embrace of the wild possibilities of a world without gravity, Chin outdoes himself. An illustrated afterword provides additional explanations of mass, matter, and force. Ages 5–8.