There Was a Black Hole that Swallowed the Universe

September 6, 2019

PreS-Gr 3-A black hole personified travels through the universe swallowing everything it comes across from galaxies to quarks. The book uses the familiar "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" refrain to take readers on a journey through space. Different sizes of matter get swallowed as the black hole traverses through space starting with the universe and galaxies, making its way through stars and planets before swallowing cells, molecules, atoms, neutrons, and quarks. The cartoon-like illustrations depict each of the described types of matter with faces and emotion adding humor to the text. Naturally, each type of matter is not depicted in proper proportion to each other as that scale wouldn't fit in the book. Using a black light, the story can be read in reverse from before the Big Bang to the creation of the universe. VERDICT As a fun way to learn about the universe and its various parts, this book makes for an excellent first purchase.-Heidi Grange, Summit Elementary School, Smithfield, UT

Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2019
Modeling a classic nursery song, a black hole does what a black hole does. Ferrie reverses the song's customary little-to-large order and shows frequent disregard for such niceties as actual rhymes and regular metrics. Also playing fast and loose with internal logic, she tracks a black hole as it cumulatively chows down, Pac-Man-style, on the entire universe, then galaxies ("It left quite a cavity after swallowing that galaxy"), stars, planets, cells, molecules, atoms, neutrons, and finally the ultimate: "There was a black hole that swallowed a quark. / That's all there was. / And now it's dark." Then, in a twist that limits the audience for this feature to aging hippies and collectors of psychedelic posters, the author enjoins viewers to turn a black light (not supplied) onto the pages and flip back through for "an entirely different story." What that might be, or even whether a filtered light source would work as well as a UV bulb, is left to anybody's guess. The black hole and most of its victims sport roly-poly bodies and comically dismayed expressions in Batori's cartoon illustrations--the universe in its entirety goes undepicted, unsurprisingly, and the quark never does appear, in the visible spectrum at least. This anthropomorphization adds a slapstick element that does nothing to pull the physics and the premise together. An unpalatable mess left half-baked by an ill-conceived gimmick. (Picture book. 6-8)

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.