By Chris Hadfield, Kate Fillion
The astronaut who was scared of the dark as a child, and the night the moon landing changed what dark meant to him.
Young Chris plays astronaut all day and is fearless about it. Then bedtime comes and the dark fills up with aliens, and he ends up in his parents' room again. In July 1969 his family crowds around a television at the cottage and watches two men walk on the moon, and Chris sees that space is the darkest dark there is, and that the astronauts went anyway. He goes back to his own bed that night and looks at the dark differently. Chris Hadfield really did command the International Space Station, and he really was that child.
It's the rare space book that gets in through the feeling rather than the facts, so it reaches the child who doesn't much care about planets. And it hands a frightened child the most useful thing anyone can: proof that the man who went furthest into the dark was once exactly as scared as they are. Hadfield never tells your child to stop being afraid. He shows them that being afraid and going anyway are the same person. The Fan Brothers' art does the heavy lifting, going from shadowy and creeping to enormous and glowing.