BEFORE YOU WERE HERE

What we are all made of, from a universal perspective.

As Westerfeld rightly points out in his debut picture book, we join every living thing in being composed of rain and sunshine, of iron and certain other elements in “stones and soil”—all of which our DNA endows with the “ticktock of the living world.” “Some of you was waiting deep in the earth, / ready to be drawn up by the roots of plants,” he muses. He goes on to unpack these lyrically presented notions in the afterword, explaining how DNA chemically codes everybody’s plan, that all living things are largely water, and that most depend on the sun’s energy in direct and indirect ways. In luminous watercolor and gouache illustrations, Lanan follows a brown-skinned family as they stroll past fruit trees and over puddles and hidden roots in an idealized landscape. As the seasons wheel by in their cycles, the mother shows increasing signs of pregnancy. Eventually, her older child watches wide-eyed as she nurses a newborn beneath a radiant burst of flowers; the child goes on to play joyfully in the snow and, in the summer, with the growing little sibling.

A glowing celebration of life, of time, and of how every part of creation connects with every other.