Gravity by Jason Chin (review)

The handsome little guy who graces the cover of this month’s issue, tricked out in swim goggles and a space-motif superhero cape, is experiencing an extraordinary twist on the adage “It’s raining buckets.” Not only does this rain comprise a literal bucket—as well as a banana, beach ball, and toy rocket—but it’s all cascading upward. And behind this metaphysical havoc is, apparently, a metatextual agent. Allow me to explain.

As the boy plays at the seaside, a copy of Gravity (yes, the very same title under consideration here) lands in his possession. Whether this book affects the entire solar system or simply stokes the boy’s already space-obsessed imagination is best left for the child audience to debate. (And—Common Core ahoy!—textual evidence can be cited in support of either hypothesis.) The point is, things turn weird, as objects head off to outer space and readers get a peek at what could happen if gravity went on hiatus. Narration splays across the comically dramatized paintings in a few sentences of large, uppercase font: “Without gravity, everything would/ float away./ The moon/ would drift/ away from/ the earth./ The earth/ would drift/ away from/ the sun.” It’s a pretty scary thought, especially as the boy clings onto a boulder for dear life as the sand and water around him go airborne. Fortunately for squeamish primary-schoolers, Chin ex machina restores gravity and universal order, returning all the objects to Earth, but delivering them playfully into the hands of new owners, much to the astonishment of little girls who lost their lemonade stand and now have a bucket and a rocket, while the beach boy has a pitcher of lemonade and paper cups.

So far this sounds like the sort of mind-bending fantasy that will appeal to fans of David Wiesner. And it is, but Chin is also a dab hand at blending imagination with information, and to readers who watched him blithely flood the New York Public Library to further a marine biology lesson in Coral Reefs (BCCB 12/11), it will come as no surprise that his universe-disturbing Gravity likewise delivers a solid science lesson. The youngest viewers will stretch their spatial sense as they follow the moon pulling away from Earth, and Earth pulling away from the sun. Kids ready for a more traditional scientific treatment can share with an adult reader the double-page spread of brief paragraphs that pursue the relationship between mass, distance, and gravitational force, as well as how weight becomes “the measure of Earth’s gravity pulling on objects.” Concise diagrams and tongue-in-cheek pictures that accompany the instruction are as entertaining as they are effective. An elephant and a mouse pose on scales to show that “elephants weigh more than mice because they have more mass”; a brawny weightlifter struggles with a box of bricks, while a toddler easily presses a much larger box of air over his head to demonstrate that “Mass Matters.”

Hopefully, elementary language arts and science teachers will wage a tugo-war (and then share nicely) for this charming twofer. But they’d better be agile and quick, because plenty of kids will want to get their own hands on it just for fun. (See p. 447 for publication information.)