There Was a Black Hole that Swallowed the Universe

by Chris Ferrie

Overview

A wildly imaginative STEAM picture book that transforms story time into a cosmic adventure! PLUS, use a black light to reveal secret, invisible text and artwork that reverses the story from nothing to the scientific creation of everything!

From bestselling children's author Chris Ferrie, this laugh-out-loud science story blends playful rhyme with vibrant illustrations. A clever, cumulative rhyme inspired by "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," this book takes curious kids ages 4–8 on a journey from galaxies to the tiniest building blocks of matter.

Bring the wonder of the universe to your next story time, and help kids see science as an exciting adventure!

There was a black hole that swallowed the universe.

I don't know why it swallowed the universe—oh well, it couldn't get worse.

There was a black hole that swallowed a galaxy.

It left quite a cavity after swallowing that galaxy.

It swallowed the galaxies that filled universe.

I don't know why it swallowed the universe—oh well, it couldn't get worse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781728250168
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	08/16/2021
Pages:	36
Product dimensions:	9.80(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.30(d)
Lexile:	490L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Masters in applied mathematics, BMath in mathematical physics and a PhD in applied mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.

Editorial Reviews

2019-07-28
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)

Kirkus Reviews