The Jupiter Stone
PreSchool-Grade 3-Text and pictures work together to stretch the minds of viewers in this journey through time and space. A striped stone falls from the sky to Earth and remains buried for millions of years, over the course of many climate changes. Dinosaurs and nomads pass. Then one day, a boy picks it up. He researches its origins, writes to NASA, and the stone is sent on a launch, where an astronaut hurls it into the "vastness of space" for another child to find. The youngster on the planet where it lands looks nothing like a human, but the galaxies whirling overhead hold a beauty of their own. Lewis's shapes and colors of the cosmos have the hypnotic quality of lava lamps. The double-page vistas extend the viewers' sense of the passage of time. These images combine with only a few sentences to stimulate thinking about our place in the universe and the possibility that alternate worlds exist.Kathy Piehl, Minnesota State University, MankatoCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.