WHAT CAME FIRST?

This import’s chaotic design and message are likely to leave younger readers more confused rather than less about life, the universe and everything. In garish, Stinky Cheese Man–style art and fits of text in wildly varying sizes and fonts, Natalini begins at the beginning with a simplistic (to say the least) picture of the Big Bang forming “an enormous ball of burning rock” that becomes our planet. Billions of years later, rain and chemical reactions create a “primordial soup” of tiny organisms that develop—as depicted in a wordless double gatefold of out-of-order scenes—into fish, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and other mammals; a glimpse of rock art provides an oblique reference to humans. On to similarly superficial views of continental drift, evolution, extinction, the science of paleontology, Darwin and environmental issues. A perfunctory run-through of big topics far too weighty to be crammed into this slim, eminently skippable volume. (Informational picture book. 8-10)