This book starts off with Nanda, as a baby, in her moms arms. She represents her mothers arms to safe, warm, and small. As Nanda grows up, her surroundings are getting bigger too. She is learning and experiencing so many new things. She eventually becomes an astronaut and although her world was getting big, in the end, she sees it as small again. She related it back to how she felt in her mothers arms. The book comes full circle. I think a message seen throughout this book is that change is scary, but it eventually feels normal. ( )

This might be my favorite children's book I've read in a long time! The words used are so much fun and the pictures help to clarify the more intense ones. For example, "whirligigs" and "scaffolds". I love how it uses these big words and creative imagery to depict simple things, such as explaining mountains and snowflakes like "Pinecone-prackled mountains and the microscopic elegance of fractals in the snow." While reading it, it felt full of imagination and also realism, mixed with lots of hope and inspiration for the future. As it follows the plot of Nanda as she grows up, it also gets more intense with its words and phrases.
The overall message of this book would be coping with change. Nanda grows and her world expands, but it comes full circle by ending with the same phrase as it starts with. ( )

When Nanda is small, her world is as well, encompassed by her mother's cradling arms. As she grows, so too does her world, her horizons expanding as her knowledge and experience do. Growing up, going to college, eventually becoming an astronaut, she eventually sees the world as small again. When viewed from space, that is...

A lovely book, one which explores the individual's relationship to their world, and their changing perceptions of that world as they grow, Small World pairs a poetic text from first-time author Ishta Mercurio with gorgeous artwork from illustrator Amy Corace, who has also worked on such titles as Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Little Pea. I appreciated the author's afterword here, which speaks of the inspiration she took from a photograph of some Indian women scientists, and I appreciated the positive message about dreaming big. Recommended to anyone looking for children's stories about growing up and making one's dreams a reality, or about a person's relationship to the wider world. ( )