By Jason Chin
Six million years of one volcanic island's whole life, from the day it broke the surface to the day it sinks back under, told as a biography.
Jason Chin does the thing nobody else quite does. He takes an idea too big to picture and paints it until you can. An island shoves up out of the Pacific as a volcano, bare and black. Then things arrive, blown in, floated in, carried in on a raft of tangled branches, and over unimaginable stretches of time they change into creatures found nowhere else on Earth: the tortoises, the iguanas that learned to swim, the finches with their different beaks. Chin structures the whole book as a life, birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and then death, because the island erodes and sinks and its story ends. Darwin turns up near the close. The paintings are extraordinary and the science is real, and there's a spread at the back laying out the whole Galápagos chain and where the theory of evolution came from.
This is the book that turns a volcano from a disaster into a machine that makes the world, and a class needs one book that does that or the whole unit is just destruction. It also hands over the hardest idea in earth science, deep time, by giving the island a life story, so six million years stops being a number and becomes a shape a child can feel. It's the bridge title, too, geology on one side and living things on the other, which makes it the natural pairing point if the unit touches evolution at all. Chin's paintings carry a lot of the load, so a child who reads well below the text can still follow the arc from the pictures alone.