Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a blue whale dies peacefully while making her 90th annual migration to northern waters. Through Emmy Award-winner (for Bill Nye the Science Guy) Lynn Brunelle’s poetic writing and Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin’s splendid illustrations, Life After Whale explores how the death of the largest animal on Earth leads to a sublime explosion of new life. As a blue whale’s body—which measures up to 110 feet long, with a heart that alone weighs 400 pounds—descends to the sea floor, “a whole new world will arise,” with millions of organisms congregating to find sustenance and shelter from what scientists call a whale fall.
Death isn’t an easy topic to tackle in a picture book, but Brunelle’s gorgeous prose successfully frames the whale’s passing not as a tragedy, but as a tranquil and essential part of nature. Both old and young readers will be captivated by the strange, sublime process of the whale fall, as this magnificent creature becomes a vast forest that provides for countless fascinating inhabitants of the deep sea: hagfish, crabs, mussels, sea cucumbers and more.
As Brunelle describes in clear, vivid language what amounts to over a hundred years’ worth of complex food chains and species interactions, Chin includes spot diagrams of processes and specific sea life that show readers what to look for in the book’s larger illustrations, which often stretch across the majority of a spread. Chin’s elegant watercolor and gouache art is crucial to the majestic atmosphere that makes Life After Whale an exemplary science book for children: With his careful details and grand compositions, the processes of decomposition and scavenging—such as a “larva of a bone-eating zombie worm” attaching itself to one of the whale’s rib bones—become beautiful and otherworldly instead of grotesque. Life After Whale is the perfect book to encourage young potential scientists to see the cycles of nature as intriguing rather than scary. Reading it ignites the kind of extravagant wonder that you might feel while exploring the moon.
