The Pebble In My Pocket
Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
How can a small, insignificant-looking pebble generate a strong sense of wonder and give readers an exciting overview of 480 million years of evolution? Well assuredly it can if it’s the one held by the girl narrator on the first page of this excellent book. “Where did you come from, pebble?” she asks and we are then zoomed back to the volcanic eruption, the ‘beginning’ of earth’s history.

Then, spread by wonderful spread, we are moved forwards, millions of years at a time, right through the entire evolution of the geosphere, to a field beside a recently built road and houses of the ‘almost’ present. (I cannot believe it’s almost twenty years since this book was first published.) As the narrator tells us her pebble has ‘been on top of mountains and under the sea. … buried in ice and in rock. … covered in drying sand and tropical forest… flung and dropped, frozen, soaked and baked, squeezed and squashed. … stood on, sheltered under and used… travelled huge distances, over immense periods of time.’ WOW! If that doesn’t inspire readers then little will.
And all the while, the text keeps track of the pebble: ‘A furry, two-horned rodent pushes past the pebble into its burrow.’ That’s 15 million years ago.

The whole text reads aloud beautifully: ‘Gradually the sand hardens, forming a new layer of rock, a conglomerate ‘pudding-stone rock.’

How easily exciting new words are, pebble-like, dropped into the narrative; but equally, Meredith Hooper presents us with the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Chris Coady’s wonderfully textured watercolours are the perfect complement for Hooper’s words; and a final spread provides a timeline with explanatory note that ‘pictures are not drawn to scale’.

Also newly re-issued from the same team is ‘The Story of Water on Our Planet’

The Drop In My Drink
Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books

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