HOW DID I GET HERE?

From the Big Bang to you, in 40 pages.

It’s clear from the cover that Bunting has set his sights pretty high: “Your Story from the BIG BANG to Your BIRTHDAY” greets readers at the top of the cover and on the title page. He jumps right in, too—in the first seven pages, readers learn that before the Big Bang, the entire universe was condensed into a space smaller than an orange before exploding into a multitude of (amusingly multilingual) particles with googly eyes. From there, readers are presented with a truncated history of the sciences, from physics to evolution. Educators or caregivers should brace themselves for the flurry of questions that the text invites. The illustrations—a mix of gouache and acrylic—are mostly helpful but may mislead in their necessary simplification. The largest visual misconception is that animals have evolved in a direct line from single-celled organisms to humans. The text intimates at branching (“And from an ancestor we share with chimps, we slowly evolved into the species we are today”), but that’s not supported by the illustrations, which imply something much more linear. Sadly, the text has also been overly simplified in some places. For example, in a discussion of pregnancy, “somewhere inside your mom’s tummy” fails both to recognize gender complexity and to use anatomically accurate language.

Amusing but lacking.