From author Azita Ardakani and acclaimed artist Rebecca Rebouché comes a timeless story about how everything comes to be—and how, in the making of the world, we find ourselves made of one another and of stardust itself
Before there was the world we know, there was only silence and shimmer—a great dark ocean of matter and possibility. Ocean of Stars follows the unfolding of creation: light forming from fire, water gathering from stars, and life arising from their meeting—until the living world begins to know itself through us.
Told in lyrical prose and brought to life through Rebecca Rebouché’s breathtaking illustrations, this picture book invites readers into a cosmic meditation on connection: how the stars became water, how water became life, and how all living things are threads in the same luminous web.
Part poem and part lullaby, Ocean of Stars offers children and adults alike a gentle way to contemplate existence—how every being, from the smallest seed to the farthest star, carries the memory of creation within. This is a story to be read aloud, wondered over, and kept close for a lifetime.
Ocean of Stars may be the biggest, little story ever told.
Praise
“The luminous prose of Ocean of Stars offers an invitation to remember our fundamental kinship with the natural world. This quiet reflection across space and tiem lets us see stars everywhere.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
“This gorgeous meditation of a story enraptures the imagination, the senses, and the soul—enfolding a human being of any age in the wonder we are, the wonder to which we belong, in which we are always held.”
—Krista Tippett
“Part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.”
—Maria Popova
