The Story of Everything: The Story of You!

K-Gr 2–Starting off with a big bang—more precisely, the Big Bang—this history of the universe sails, with appropriate sound effects, past the arrivals of stars and planets, the appearance (ROAR!!) of dinosaurs and their disappearance (BOOM!) in the wake of a falling asteroid, the rise of primates (just as noisy), the onset of humans, and all the way to that special day when, “you came to be.” Presented in a vertical format until the closing summation, and resembling collage sprays of irregularly cut-paper scraps, ­Cosgrove’s digital illustrations go from bursts of stars to roiling tumults of changing lifeforms and landforms that give way in due course to a more settled, serene close. Though this is written as nonfiction, the couple’s ­eponymous baby (with brown skin like the parents) at the end is represented as a spray of fairy wings not unlike those on the backs of the prehistoric people in an earlier scene; in an afterword, Newhouse claims that scientists who study fossils are called “­geologists.” The book may work better as a general read, being dedicated more to tone and energy than factual accuracy.