Most famous for her perfect picture books of machines like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Virginia Lee Burton as a children’s book author and illustrator is more or less considered the gold standard by librarians and home librarians alike. Her marvelous illustration perfectly brings to life her delightful timeless storytelling.
My nearly seventeen-year-old man-cub has the privilege of doing some small database work for our friends at Biblioguides. Each week he works on tags and is exposed to hundreds of amazing books. We have a special text chat just for all of the things he comes across that he thinks I would like to know about for our library. When he was working on some of the Virginia Lee Burton books and discovered this one, both of us were stunned. I had never heard of this book! But once I saw the preview of it, I knew we needed it.
Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton is a story of the life of the earth (and all living things on it). The magic begins on the title page. She tells us immediately that this is a great drama by setting up the title page as a theatrical program. Here, she also lists a team of authors but draws them rather than naming them. Clever. Children will love that.
Inside the program, she lists the authors as “An Astronomer, a Geologist, a Paleontologist, a Historian, a Grandmother, and VIRGINIA LEE BURTON.” She then lists the cast. Again, clever.
Next, she reserves three pages for the breakdown of the acts and scenes. Not only is it arranged intelligently, but the marginalia is incredible.
And then, the play begins. While she calls it a play, I think of it much more as if it were a great opera. There is such musicality to her writing and great drama in her arrangement of ideas.
As you can see from the illustration, she begins with the large and works toward the small. Each act of the play tells the story of a major age in the life of the earth, the first acts and ages being vast and incalculable. And then each subsequent age becomes smaller, more specific.
When she gets to Act V: Most Recent Life, her storytelling is very specifically about one family on one farm over many years.
This book is a marvel. It is the very definition of a living book. It invites our children (and ourselves) into the wonder and awe of life. And it does it with beautiful, thoughtful, teaching illustration and exceptional storytelling. It is science the way science should be taught.
I happen to have an older printing. It has been reprinted and is available quite economically. I haven’t seen the new printing, and it does say it is updated, but for less than $10 (at the time of writing this) I think it is likely to be a good gamble.
There is an absolutely marvelous picture book biography of Virginia Lee Burton called Big Machines, you can find our review of it here. You can learn more about Virginia Lee Burton at Biblioguides, here.