The Size of Everything: Ginormous Galaxies, Itty-Bitty Quarks, and Me

The Size of Everything: Ginormous Galaxies, Itty-Bitty Quarks, and Me

Start with an eight-year-old. Then choose: How small—or how big—do you want to go? The Size of Everything is a faith-based science picture book that uses your child's own size as the starting point for exploring everything from itty-bitty quarks to ginormous galaxies.

And the unusual part is that you literally start in the middle of the book.

From there, your child chooses which direction to travel. Turn the pages one way, and everything gets progressively smaller, moving through creatures and structures smaller than he is, down through cells and eventually to tiny quarks. Head the other direction, and everything gets bigger, passing animals, towering landmarks, planets, and finally enormous galaxies.

It's a clever way to make scale more concrete. Rather than simply telling your child that a redwood is enormous or a quark unimaginably small, The Size of Everything gives him a familiar reference point—himself—and lets him see where everything else fits in relation to it.

Along the way, dozens of colorful photographs and more than 100 science facts introduce subjects from biology, physics, geography, and astronomy. Poison dart frogs can share the same book with redwood trees and the Milky Way because the point isn't to study any one of them exhaustively. It's to help your child grasp the astonishing range of sizes found in the world and beyond it.

And the book approaches all of this from an explicitly Christian worldview. From the smallest particles to the largest galaxies, The Size of Everything presents creation as God's work. It emphasizes your child's own significance within it. Faith isn't tucked into a final paragraph or added onto otherwise secular science content; it's woven throughout the book's exploration of the created world.

At just 32 pages, The Size of Everything isn't intended to teach your child everything there is to know about cells, animals, planets, or galaxies. Instead, it gives him a fascinating framework for comparing them—and more than 100 reasons to stop along the way and say, "Wait, how big is that?"