MAKING MORE- How Life Begins: A Masterpiece from Katherine Roy

In case you haven't noticed, I read MANY picture books across many styles, topics, intended audiences, and formats. Here's is one that took me by surprise with its scope, beauty, and content, a triumph of story, images, and language. 

Norton Young Readers, 2023

MAKING MORE: How Life Begins is entirely the creation of Katherine Roy. and it's all about creation. As the tag line on her website states, and perfectly describes the unforgettable books Roy has created to date:

Creating beautiful, science-based books that tell the story of the natural world.

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed her prior titles. (Click her name above to see them featured on her website.) In the case of this latest release, Roy has taken on a topic immensely broader than her prior titles, as expansive and comprehensive as those other very special titles were: stars, Mars, sharks, elephants, and ocean depths.

In this case, She addresses the ways in which life reproduces itself. That, in fact, has always been the definition of life:  from microscopic plants and creature to ourselves. An essential element in any definition of life is its capacity to reproduce themselves.

The visual narrative that ties these portrayals together involves an obviously pregnant woman, an apparently male partner, a young boy, and their dog. The opening spread states her case clearly with a familiar robin on center-right stage, bill grasping grass tufts to prepare a nest. Directly from that page is more memorable and important text, which I'll refer to again as I conclude. 

"Everywhere, all around you, life is making more. Mammals and insects. Trees and flowers.Fish and frogs. Like food and water, like oxygen and sunlight, reproduction is essential for our Earth."

The page turn extends this universal truth about the most frequently observed reproduction pattern:

"Meet, merge, and create something NEW."

The family explores and observes within a wild habitat that appears to be temperate northern hemisphere but with truths that apply across the globe.

After that gloriously powerful launch, Roy moves to more  detailed text and images that  address genes, DNA, cells, gametes and scientific side notes and images with accurate labels to help  make sense of the more complex expository text. Even so, the natural scenes on facing pages invite even the youngest to pay rapt attention to a reading, even if the content is more environmentally advanced that they are ready to fully absorb. Even someone (like me), someone who has seen such creatures and settings in real life and in a variety of images, can  find curiosity rising and questions propelling us onward.

Roy demonstrates mastery of  scope, too, not just related to species variations. This content explores the HOW, but not limited to mechanics at the observable or cellular level, ways the merging is supported by sound, sight, and other signals to connect the matching living things in the area. it also notes ways in which chance plays an incredible role, including external fertilization and internal mating. Exceptional cases are also addressed, like bees and other insects pollinating plants, though some plants like ferns reproduce without requiring others of their own kind or pollination to generating MORE life.

Roy's illustrations are a masterful mix of being beautifully expressive and accurately drawn, labeled, and painted with color and other details that make this a picture book that might well supplement understanding among advanced science studies. Even the topic of crossing between/among species of many living things plays a role in the important truth that CHANGE is another essential aspect of Earth's survival. The concluding art spread opens into a double-wide gatefold of celebration of new life, one that carries that visual narrative of the single family into a social event representing a wider community. Readers could spend long minutes savoring and investigating. 

Back matter is an effective resource for parent/teacher/librarian readers and also for young readers who have reached a developmental stage of readiness for study and discussion of the details of this subject matter. The KEY TERMS glossary is thorough and helpful, with species listed in the order in which they appear, using common names and scientific ones. I especially appreciate this approach  (as opposed to noting those  in smaller font on each page as they occur) because the technically-detailed pages are able to remain the focus of the book. A "backyard" note indicates that Roy chose to identify and investigate living things in her own proximity. She issues a direct invitation to explore near home with suggestions to readers of places they might be on any given day in their own lives, and things to look for. A full page of small-font text describes/explains very effectively what is happening at a cellular level during MEIOSIS, with easy to follow (and notated) illustrations of each step in the process. Don't miss the author note that follows all this. it is like having Roy as as guest in your home/mind!

Even if scientific and other nonfiction topics are not your favorite types of picture books (which is hard to imagine, but can be true!) please take a close look at this one. Once you do, I'm guessing you will track down all the other picture books by this impressive creator/scientist.  I'm for one, mama eager to see MORE picture books emerging from her talent and knowledge.

As mentioned in opening lines above, I want to return that opening text in the book, these words:

"Everywhere, all around you, life is making more. Mammals and insects. Trees and flowers.Fish and frogs. Like food and water, like oxygen and sunlight, reproduction is essential for our Earth."

My eagerness for you (any and all of you reading this) to find, read, and consider the value of this book is based on its own merits. Beyond that, I am actively urging you to learn about it and talk about it. This hinges on the current political movement (by a a loud and powerful, but small contingent of activists) to remove many books from public access. This could become a prime candidate for such censorship. There is nothing graphic or shocking in this offering, but the very topic seems to be beyond rigid and arbitrary "standards", offending efforts to deny science and information to those outside their personal purview. If you check this out and believe it belongs in schools and libraries and homes, please speak up-- among your friends, to your librarians, and in public settings. Thank you.

BORN ON THE WATER: The 1619 Project in Picture Book

 Take a close look at this breathtaking cover. 

KOKILA: Penguin Random House Imprint, 2021

BORN ON THE WATER; The 1619 Project is a visual work of art with text that's  a masterful work of heart. It's a new picture book that merits everyone's close attention, co-written by Nicole Hannah-Jones and Renee Watson, with illustrations by Nikkolas Smith that are equally evocative and emotive. This youthful perspective on four centuries of history is a deeply personal and powerful account for readers of any age. 

Brilliantly, the co-authors launch with these words that will sound familiar to most parents of school age children:

"My teacher gives us an assignment, 'Who are you?' she asks. 'Trace your roots. Draw a flag that represents your ancestral land.' "

In this first of a series of free-verse poetry page-turns, the  first-person narrator/student feels ashamed. Her roots are unknown to her, her ancestral history feels confusing and unknown, shackled to an enslaved origin story..

When Grandma gathers her family close to share their beginnings, I felt as if I were sitting at her knee, invited to share in the story and the glory of a too-little-known past. Contradicting the common expression that African American ancestors were "born on the water", Grandma describes their true home, a place, a land. Before they were sold.

"A home, a place, a land, a beginning."

Spread after spread captures scenes of ancestral lives on a fertile high plateau in west Africa, portraying people with talent, trades, love, languages, craftsmen and music makers, all with a capacity to turn surrounding nature into an complex and collaborative civilization. Lives and faces engage joyfully and in ways that feel familiar to any family's life. The authors' and illustrator's notes in back pages reinforce the sense of individuality and beauty and connection of those ancestors. 

There are realistic accounts of being kidnapped, marched, loaded aboard the first slave ship to North America, heartbreaking details and emotional visuals included. In many ways the horror and heartbreak are conveyed as much by the losses experienced as by the imposed enslavement: a doll left behind, separations with no hugs goodbye, no whispered encouragements, no capacity to understand what their destiny would be. Somewhere along that journey, those who survived (barely half of the original prisoners) realized that they, the survivors, were now a People together, a new community. 

Facts unfold about that first slave ship, THE WHITE LION, about the first Black child born as the son of slaves on North American soil, William Tucker, the first Black American, about four hundred years of resistance in large ways and small. The refrain rings true: 

"OURS IS NO IMMIGRANT STORY."

Theirs is a story of survival. Of brilliance. Of memories, prayers, and hope. Theirs is story that keep eyes on the future, a future of brilliant innovators and contributors to the land they built. Theirs is a full and rightful claim to being AMERICAN from the start, centuries before "we" became a country. A country that defined itself as white.

And the young narrator begins her assignment with red, white, and blue crayons to draw the flag of her country, born on the water.

If you are confused by the phrase CRITICAL RACE THEORY, please be clear. Books as wonderful as this could be banned in schools even though they have nothing to do with that advanced academic discussion. This is a glorious but age-appropriate story of ancestral identity and pride. This story reveals to children of EVERY color and identity why BLACK LIVES MATTER. Please read it. Please share it. Please speak up when others suggest that this story should not be available to every child, in every school and library. And ask yourselves why THIS story is considered threatening to our culture when historic accounts of unjust treatment of white-immigrants-by-choice in our history (Irish, Polish, Italian) who suffered discrimination and hate are written into the narrative. Please don't turn away or look away, or allow young readers to be denied an opportunity to read and understand their shared past.