You Are Stardust, and: You Are a Star! (review)

Young children who have begun to speculate about how they fit into nature's grand scheme may find direction for their musings in this pair of picture books. Kelsey's Stardust trains a more panoramic lens on the universe, offering tiny paragraphs that explain how an exploding star supplied the atoms that would much later make the child, how the water you now drink was once enjoyed by dinosaurs, how a soft breath or a hearty sneeze spreads pollen, etc. A final note assures the audience that "every example in this book is backed by current science," but this is a rather disjointed project overall, with undefined terms and observations that sometimes veer from poetic to cryptic ("You grow at night when your bones are resting, just like the sheep you count to help you sleep"). Perhaps more appealing than the text are the inventive cut-paper and realia dioramas, with objects anchored by fine string into an open framed box. With its tighter focus and clearer trajectory, Parker's title is somewhat more successful. Cast as a bedtime piece, Star! invites children to imagine themselves out deep in the starry night sky, where a star burns hotter and hotter until it explodes. The takeaway lesson—that the dust from stellar explosions reaches earth and becomes the stuff of which we are made—is considerably harder to follow, particularly since Rossell portrays the minuscule dust particles as relatively hefty balls of light that move "through animals and trees and fruit until . . . You eat the fruit, and then the tiny pieces of star are inside you." Appended "Star Facts" add some interesting trivia, so a science-minded youngster might nonetheless enjoy this as an intriguing alternative to standard nighttime fare.