8 Little Planets

In 8 Little Planets, physicist and mathematician Chris Ferrie briefly introduces preschoolers to the eight planets in our solar system. Physically, the board book’s pages feature eight die-cut concentric circles, each in decreasing circumference, with a cartoon-like Sun appearing at their centre. Each circle is outlined by a different colour, and it appears that the book’s designer may have been attempting to reproduce the colours of the light spectrum; however, in the printing, two shades of green have unfortunately appeared.

Each planet is treated on a pair of facing pages, with the planet’s four-lines of rather bland rhyming text being equally divided between the pages. The aabb rhyme scheme is often near-rhyme as opposed to perfect.

In its own way, 8 Little Planets is also a mini-counting book, albeit one that counts down from 8 to 1 using numbers written as figures. At the same time, the text also introduces youngsters to the concept of ordinal numbers, as can be seen in the above except (“the 8th little planet”).

The biggest problem with 8 Little Planets is the dissonance between its physical appearance and its contents. Lizzy Doyle’s cartoon-style anthropomorphic representations of the planets and the Sun come across as being cutesy. Potential purchasers, judging this board book by its holey cover and smiling cartoon planets, could view it as being just another simple toy book and pass on it. That decision would be unfortunate as Ferrie’s text, while echoing the anthropomorphic approach to the subject matter, contains two solid facts about each of the planets. For example, young readers will learn that Venus experiences 900 degree temperatures (F or C?) and is “the brightest planet in the [night?] sky”. As well, Ferrie does not shy away from using “scientific” terminology, such as “orbiting”, “axis”, “mass”, “dense” and “moonlets”. Some adults who are facilitating the book’s reading might simply pass over such words, but others, either in response to a child’s questions or their own desire to inform, may use these words as opportunities to extend the book’s contents. Though easily overlooked, the book’s back cover contains “8 LITTLE BONUS FACTS!”, one for each planet. For instance, Ferrie’s text for Mercury simply described it as “super fast”, but the bonus fact quantifies that description: “Mercury takes 88 Earth days to orbit the Sun.” While readers can turn to the Internet to clarify, for example, what Ferrie meant when he wrote that “[Uranus] looks a bit weird spinning on one side”, it would have been much more effective, content-wise, if the book’s last page had been used to provide some expansion of the facts imbedded in Ferrie’s poetry.

More likely a home as opposed to an institutional purchase, 8 Little Planets offers opportunities for gaining some science knowledge, learning numbers and adding to one’s storehouse of words.