The Street Beneath My Feet

A foldout, concertina format creates a visceral sense of a journey to the center of the Earth as readers travel past storm drains, buried artifacts, a subway, and many layers of rock on their way to the planet’s inner core. Zommer’s illustrations are a hive of subterranean activity, and Guillain’s captionlike bursts enthuse about everything readers are seeing: “These small drips build up to make big stalactites,” she writes as spikes pile up beside an underground river. “It can take hundreds of years!” On the way back up (on the reverse side of the pages), readers observe minerals, metamorphic rock, fossils, nesting badgers, a fox den, and finally topsoil as they approach the surface. Although the book spends most of its time in the Earth’s crust, a closing page gives a better sense of just how much real estate the mantle and core take up. Ages 5–8. (Mar.)