The Pebble in my Pocket: A History of Our Earth
Grade 2-4?A child muses about the long history of a pebble, from its volcanic origins when the Earth was young to the day she picks it up off the ground. The conceit doesn't quite work, as the narrator sounds like an adult lecturer?"Two great landmasses, like giant plates, are colliding...It is 395 million years ago."?but the idea of using some common object or artifact as a springboard to the past is a tried-and-true one. Coady places an array of familiar, dramatically rendered dinosaurs and other flora and fauna in landscapes characteristic of each passing era. A timeline at the end includes labels for animals not previously named. More conventionally scientific than George Ella Lyon's Who Came Down That Road? (Orchard, 1992), this title makes an appealing alternative or replacement for Bruce Hiscock's The Big Rock (Atheneum, 1988).?John Peters, New York Public LibraryCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.