By Julia Rothman
A big, beautifully hand-drawn field book that pulls the natural world apart and labels every piece, from the layers of the earth to the parts of a feather to what a cloud is made of.
This is a browse-anywhere illustrated encyclopedia of nature, all in Julia Rothman's warm, hand-painted style. Open it and you might land on a labeled diagram of the inside of a leaf, or the phases of the moon, or the anatomy of a snail, or a spread of different animal tracks, or how a mushroom is built, or the layers of a forest. There's no plot and no order you have to follow. A child just flips to whatever grabs them and reads the neat, labeled bits, then flips somewhere else. It covers the sky, the ground, plants, animals, weather, and water.
It's built for a reader who devours fact books for pleasure and wants the real names of things. Because it's organized as browsable spreads rather than a story, there's no pressure to finish it, which suits a dip-in-and-out reader perfectly. And it's lovely to look at, so it works as a keepable gift, a coffee-table book a nature-loving child actually reaches for.