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When we experience awe, we feel in touch with something breathtakingly big and mysterious. It makes us think differently about ourselves, our connection to each other, and our place in the universe. It’s a lot to ask of a single picture book, and yet so many of my favorites leave me feeling changed in this way. This month, I’m taking notes on how they do it. Sometimes it’s a poetic voice or a unique perspective that makes the difference. Other times it’s a format or refrain that builds a container for the reader to experience something amazing about the world. Below are the themes and patterns I noticed. What books evoke awe for you?

Nature

Some themes naturally lend themselves to evoking awe. The strangeness of science and the beauty of nature open doors to this experience. Moments that let us move between worlds, like birth, death, and changing seasons, encourage us to think about the how and why of life. Little Sap by Jan Hughes tells the story of a small sapling that longs to grow into a mother tree that serves the whole forest. The glowing illustrations evoke a sense of awe at our interconnectedness, but the language adds layers too. Hughes writes, “In spring, when bluebells carpet the woodlands, Little Sap shows off her newly budding leaves, glistening like jewels in the sunlight” and “Little Sap wants to touch the sky, but tree time is very slow.” The sensory details she uses give readers the sense of what it’s like to be a tree in all its beauty and strangeness.

Scale

Large numbers can leave us numb, but understanding how truly abundant or large something is can evoke wonder and awe. Child of Galaxies alternates between describing the infinite and our very personal experiences with lines like “And though your part may be small, you are part of it all. You are rooted right here on the surface, heading nowhere at all, on a life giving ball, you can only suppose there’s a purpose.” The rhyming text gives the abstract concepts a dynamic energy.
With simple text, A Million Dots celebrates scale in a more literal way, moving from a single circle to a million circles over the course of the book. Each spread is twice as dense as the last. The end result is a panoramic pull out that boggles the mind and leaves readers wanting to study the pages.

Big Ideas

The best high-concept books go beyond compiling fun examples to offering something greater than the sum of their parts. If You Come to Earth is a guide for alien visitors, inspired by Sophie Blackwell’s conversations with children around the world. It could be cloying or glib, but the variety and detail make it feel expansive and inspiring. With lines like “There are more than seven billion people on Earth. We all have bodies. But every body is different. Except for my friends who are identical twins and look the same. Except for Mustafa’s mole,” the voice is also full of wonder and childlike frankness.

Biographies

Witnessing the courage and creativity people bring to their lives can inspire us to be more purposeful in our own lives. Luna & Me and The Stuff Between the Stars both feature women who dreamed big and overcame obstacles to change the world. Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw took poetic liberties with the story of Julia Butterfly Hill who protected Luna the Redwood by living in her branches for two years. By making the main character in the picture book a young girl, rather than a young woman, she made the biography more engaging for readers, while the author’s note at the end tells the real story. She curated the details to focus less on the politics and danger and more on the courage, wonder, and magic that Julia brought to the forest. The Stuff Between the Stars follows Vera Rubin’s journey as a rare woman astronomer in the 1950s and 1960s. And while the book centers her experience, Sandra Nickel’s doesn’t try to resolve her work or draw tidy conclusions. Instead she celebrates the questions and mysteries that Rubin’s work revealed. It’s that “stuff between the stars,” the unknown, mysterious places in space that leave readers in awe not just of Rubin but of the universe.

Visual Beauty

In How to Read a Book Melissa Sweet uses fluorescents, intriguing textures, hand lettering, and fold-out pages to punctuate Kwame Alexander’s effervescent poem. She repeats shapes, especially circles, spirals, and starbursts, creating small visual explosions throughout the book. When You Are the Light arrived on my doorstep, it felt like nothing else. I gasped when I opened the package. It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to holding a book from another planet. This is a book that needs to be a book. Not an ebook or a blog or a podcast or a one-day idea. The text inside is like a blessing to the world, and it begs to be read outside. I imagine Aaron Becker thought, “If I could just say one thing, what would it be,” and this is the result.

Poetry

While some books create a sense of awe through big sweeping ideas and illustrations, others are quieter and more intimate. You Belong Here by MH Clark is a favorite of children and grown ups, because it portrays loving one another as being as natural and effortless as animals finding their homes. This text rhymes as well, and here it brings an inevitability and closure to each thought, as well as a gentle momentum that pulls the reader through to the end of the book. The writer also slows down the reader’s experience with punctuation, line breaks, and page breaks, so there’s time to absorb the magic.

Try This

You may want to evoke awe in your reader at the beginning, middle, or end of your book. Try adding a dramatic pause, page turn, or line break to set the mood. Or play around with repetition throughout to allude to scale. Add sensory language that draws readers into your story. Look for ways to add variety and memorable details. Curate your reader’s experience, leaving space for mystery and magic. It also helps to choose your topic carefully. If you’re in awe of your subject, readers will sense your enthusiasm. Send me a message to let me know what works for you.