Infinity and Me (review)

So innocuous-looking a symbol, that recumbent numeral eight. But for the little girl Uma, pondering the deep night sky (during a bout of sleeplessness brought on by the excitement of a new pair of red shoes), the concept of infinity is elusive, intimidating, and even a little bit scary. The next day she asks classmates, relatives, and acquaintances how they would express their understanding of infinity, and their range of answers, from sensible to poetic, provides the child—and readers of any age—a way to master the idea. For Grandma, infinity is a family extending limitless generations into the future. For Uma's friend Samantha, it's a racetrack you can drive around forever. For the school cook, it's endless divisibility: "In your mind . . . could you cut that tiny piece of noodle in half forever?" Uma's own attempt at imagining infinity begins with something she'd like to do forever—have recess—and ends with the vague worry that eternal recess might be a paradox: "If there's no school before recess, and no school after recess, is it really recess anymore?" Uma admits that these thoughts make her head hurt, and her pleasure at having Grandma notice and compliment her new red shoes brings her (and audiences') musings back down to stable, solid, comforting Earth. Swiatkowska's imaginative artwork combines the free-wheeling, slightly eerie absurdity of Monty Python animations, the formality of nineteenth-century decorative patterning, and the playful nerdiness of Leonardo da Vinci-styled inventions. For math and language arts teachers in search of curricular common ground, 8 marks the spot.