THE JUPITER STONE

A beautifully eerie opening scene shows a meteorite falling through the earth's atmosphere. Over a series of naturalistic spreads, eons pass. The ecosystem changes from sea-bottom to sand with a minimum of text ("Millions of years passed.../ and passed..."). The feet of a dinosaur and a proto-human pass by. The elements smooth the pocked surface of the stone (which always manages to be on the surface), and its details resolve into a likeness of the planet Jupiter. At last, a boy in sneakers finds it on a pebbly beach, and his mother asks, "Where do you think it came from?" The book does not give the boy's hypotheses; instead, he appears next at a desk, surrounded by model rockets and science posters ("Inspired by the answer he found, the boy wrote a letter"). The following pages make another grand leap: A U.S. space shuttle takes off ("The stone was launched into orbit"), and a NASA astronaut uses the boy's slingshot to fling the stone into the void ("to tumble again in the vastness of space"). Such abrupt transitions skip deductive reasoning in their rush to get to the payoff. In the end, a green scaly "child" in an alien landscape finds the stone, continuing the sequence into infinity. Lewis (Frog Girl) urges readers to speculate on the origins of their surroundings. Yet, paradoxically, the book leaves little margin for the joy of discovery, unlike Kate Banks and George Hallensleben's virtuosic A Gift from the Sea (2001). Ages 6-up. (Aug.)