ALA Booklist (Mon Feb 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Hoping to turn her readers on to the solar system, Sobel tours the sun and its revolving consorts. Intentionally evoking wonder over data, she tries out varying compositional forms for each orb, so that this work forms a set of essays, a literary counterpart to Gustav Holst's 1916 symphonic suite The Planets . The comparison waxes explicit when Sobel ruminates upon Saturn, the incomparable ringed beauty of the solar system and also Holst's favorite. Allusive of age and serenity, Saturn has inspired connotations in mythology and astrology, and these are turned over elegantly in Sobel's emotive prose, which recalls the awe it and its wandering companions inspired in ancient times but which city lights and, perhaps, space-age knowledge have washed out. Yet with subtle balance, Sobel adds background about the planets' discoveries without tipping her essays in the encyclopedic direction as she discusses Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. However, she handles Uranus and Neptune altogether differently, in an imagined letter from Catherine Herschel, astronomer-sister of Uranus-finder William Herschel, to nineteenth-century American astronomer Maria Mitchell, which indirectly addresses the topic of women in science amid providing the history of the planets' first detections. A thoughtful, apt diction permeates Sobel's journey among the planets, creating a mood of reading pleasure that also helped make Longitude (1995) a best-seller.

Horn Book (Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2018)

This third edition of Gibbons's book includes much information discovered since its first publication (e.g., Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet and the fact that scientists now believe that there was once water on Mars). The volume, illustrated with inviting art, is a useful, interesting, and clear resource for young astronomers.

School Library Journal

K-Gr 2-Gibbons uses brief declarative sentences to describe the sun and each planet of the solar system in succession, introducing concepts such as a day, a year, orbit, and rotation. Her paintings sometimes tread the edge of oversimplicity; in a demonstration of day and night, there is almost no contrast between the planet's light and dark sides, and though she mentions in the text that Pluto is currently closer to the sun than Neptune, their orbits do not cross in the illustrations. Still, the bright colors, simplified shapes, and spacious, uncomplicated page design make this an inviting gateway to the subject. The book closes with an introduction to astronomy, creating a natural transition to the author's Stargazers (Holiday, 1992).-John Peters, New York Public Library