The fire of stars: The life and brilliance of the woman who discovered what stars are made of by Kirsten W. Larson, illustrated by Katherine Roy

This is a brilliant picture book, combining biography and astronomy with smoothly flowing text and really stunning illustrations.

The endpages are explosions of scattered stars against a black background. As the story begins, with Cecilia as a curious small child, her growing years are paralleled by a slowly expanding universe showing the birth of a star. The starscape shrinks and expands as Cecilia's world grows and then shrinks, when she is taken to the city and sent to a strict religious school. The swathes of fiery color against the black universe slowly surround the illustrations of her life, growing until they cover a whole page and birth a star, just as Cecilia is born as a scientist. Now the star images switch to the right side of the page, fading away as Cecilia's world broadens when she travels to America and the Harvard observatory, eventually following the last spread of Cecilia's world with a full spread of the earth slowly turning and revealing the sun against a stark black background.

Larson has created extensive back matter, including a short biography of Cecilia Payne, details of how a star is created, matched up to the thumbnails and text of the book, a timeline of Cecilia's life, and a bibliography. Roy's loose, brilliant illustrations perfectly capture Payne's childhood and early years and the beauty of the universe that she eventually was able to explore.

Verdict: This is one of the few picture book biographies I've found that would make a great read-aloud for younger children, but it would also be a brilliant choice for a classroom or older group of listeners as well.

ISBN: 9781452172873; Published February 2023 by Chronicle; Borrowed from another library in my consortium