A Million Dots (review)

Schwartz's How Much Is a Million? (BCCB 7/85) has long been the standard in what might be termed magnitudeology, but now Clements (author of Frindle, BCCB 10/96) and Reed take on the millionaire's challenge in a new way: with dots. The first few pages offer dots in smaller numbers—a singleton, ten, and cells of one hundred, five hundred, and a thousand; the book then gives viewers the opportunity to witness (though it notes that looking at every dot would take you eleven and a half days) a full million dots. The challenge, of course, is to keep viewers from becoming numb to the passage of dots through the pages, and the book rises to it creatively. Each page has a block of approximately 24,000 dots overlaying an illustration like a screen, and each illustration singles out one dot (or occasionally two) in a circled highlight, with a caption noting the number of that dot and that number's significance in some scientific/sociocultural factoid (the caption for dot number 24,901, for instance, tells us that "it is 24,901 miles around the Earth at the equator," and the illustration features a peaceful cobalt and green planet); every recto also offers the cumulative dot total as of that spread ("47,679 dots so far"). The result is a series of visual puzzles as well as a lesson in enumeration: while keen observers may get a boost by noting that the captions are boxed in the same color as the highlighting circle on each page, it can be astonishingly difficult to locate some of the circles, so kids will be steeping themselves in a considerable percentage of the million dots as they make their way through the book. The art isn't particularly prepossessing in its own right (the digitally rendered images recall the startlingly vivid colors and stodgy draftsmanship of textbook illustration), but it's effective at performing its service here, and it does collateral labor in encouraging observers to look closely at images in general. Though the number trivia is pretty random and haphazard, it adds spice to the hunt, and young readers will find the digging enjoyable even as it makes its enumerative point.