I’m sometimes surprised by the topics that pop up in nonfiction picture books. Carl Sagan seems to me more like newspaper material than history book fodder, but to an audience of four to eight year olds, he’s just as much The Past as are George Washington and Julius Caesar. After all, he died years and years before they were born, clear back in 1996.

This playful biography uses surprising turns of language and the charming refrain, “Wowie!” to capture Sagan’s zest for explaining astrophysics to a lay audience. The book starts with  Sagan’s childhood fascinations and moves on to his college studies and then his professional career.

I loved the way the book used page turns to surprise and delight. In the first example, the child Sagan is testing the limits of his imagination:

His favorite character, John Carter could stand with his arms outstretched and wish himself to Mars…[page turn] But nothing happened.

Later, the page turn manages to encapsulate years and years of adult work:

He studied life and space and became…[page turn]…Dr. Carl Sagan.

The illustrations are cartoony and fun (and require you at one point to turn the book on its side and open a gatefold). The back matter tells about how the author got interested in the topic and gives a great “Notes” section where the sources for the book’s contents are given page by page. Wowie!

Star Stuff: Carl Sagan and the Mysteries of the Cosmos by Stephanie Roth Sisson. Roaring Brook Press: 2014.