The World and Everything in It

Serene reflectiveness flows through this meditation by Henkes (Little Houses), whose simple prose initially segments the universe into two camps: "big things and little things." An early spread shows both: a grown, gnarled tree is pictured against billowing clouds on a grassy rise; a seedling grows beside it. In subsequent pages, framed spreads display diminutive entities: "Little animals.// Tiny flowers.// Pebbles.// Things so small you can't see them." Shown against backgrounds of white, they evoke the objective calm of encyclopedia illustrations. Next come the big things, including "The sea.// The sun.// The moon." Humans are in the middle, and able to interact with both, having "some of the little things"--spreads show children of various skin tones holding the items--and fragments of big things, too. "The moon is big, / but you can see all of it/ out the window in your bedroom." But how big is big? How small is small? "Most of the things are in-between," straightforward text concludes. "Like you./ And me." Spare images and text, and an almost reverent stream of thought, helps illuminate humans' comparative scale in the wide, variously populated world. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)