Reviewed by Antonella Townsend
Isabel Thomas, with artist Daniel Egnéus, take young children on a journey back to the beginning of time and it all begins with a frog. Frog: A Story of Life on Earth is a lovely 250 x 250 mm hard cover colourful book for young audiences, and I think it makes a charming coffee table book.
The cycle of frog life is explained via a series of full-page colourful illustrations beginning as a young child spots a pool full of jelly-like eggs … eggs to tadpoles … tadpoles growing legs so becoming the famous frog. The small child asks if frogs come from eggs and eggs from frogs, where did the first frog come from? And so young audiences are off on the journey going back before frogs, before people and plants and before Earth and stars.
Back to the beginning
When everything that is, was, and ever will be
was squashed together
in a superheated speck
too tiny to
imagine.
Beautifully explained and illustrated, Isabel Thomas and Daniel Egnéus take their audience from expanding specks to the Big Bang, to colliding, clumping specks, to the first atoms. To exploding stars and stardust forming new stars and planets, moons and mountains, forests … and frogs. But no frogs yet.
Back to eight billion years after the Big Bang stardust formed our Sun, more gravity at work and now eight planets. Earth gets the best position, not too hot not too cold. And now the Earth is covered in water. But still no frogs. Chemicals and cells multiplying to form single cell creatures. Cells clumping and larger living things. Still no frogs yet. Sea creatures evolve to amphibians, living in water and land; including the first frog! Simplistic but just right for small children.
Not just a frog, but the story of the universe, retold.
The last few pages reiterate the story in small print.
This charming book simplifies complicated science expanding young minds.
Recommended.
Frog: A Story of Life on Earth
by Isabel Thomas and Daniel Egnéus
(2025)
Bloomsbury
Hard Cover
ISBN: 9781526600752
$24.29; 48pp