THE PEBBLE IN MY POCKET

Hooper and Coady pass on a sense of wonder for the history contained in one small pebble in an outstanding picture-book overview of 480 million years. The narrator, a young girl, holds a small pebble up and asks a simple question: ``Where did you come from, pebble?'' The book flashes back to the ``beginning'' of earth history, a dramatic spread of red hot volcanoes on the earth's crust spewing forth fire and rocks. One page and 85 million years later, the earth's surface is beginning to rise and buckle, rain and snow cause cracks in the rocks, and the first living things appear on the land. Seas rise and fall, fish give way to giant amphibians, amphibians give way to dinosaurs, then furry rodents, mammoths, early man, saber-toothed tigers, farms, houses, and modern times. The text never loses track of the pebble, worn smooth by rain and wind, packed into a new layer of rock forming under the sea, pushed up into mountains as the earth tilts and folds, and carried by glaciers to the field where the girl finds it. The final page offers a chronology with charts. A note makes clear that species are not drawn to scale, and other licenses taken. Coady provides spectacular paintings, given texture, weight, and movement by the strokes of his brush. (Nonfiction. 7-12)