A child narrates simple descriptions of the planets, the sun, and the moon, and their positions in the solar system. Bright, cartoonish illustrations, some in the form of children's drawings, enliven the traditional listing of planets but introduce scientific errors and nonstandard representations of time, distance, and space.

PreS-Gr 2-The creators of Me on the Map (Crown, 1996) trump Robin Hirst's My Place in Space (Orchard, 1990) by adding a tour of the solar system to their young narrator's cheery recitation of her place in the universe. Donning an imaginary space suit and dashing off childlike crayon drawings as she goes, the russet-haired tour guide takes viewers past the Moon, Sun, and each planet, then out to the Milky Way and beyond. At each stop, she furnishes a digestible fact or two (Venus's "gleaming cloud cover makes it the brightest planet of them all"). Finally, she returns to her room to wonder, "Way out in space, is there another...planet like Earth? With another someone like me? Could be." Cable fills the spaces behind and around the crayon art with soft-focus views of a well-furnished playroom or unobtrusive star fields. Pair this upward-facing journey with Steve Jenkins's Looking Down (Ticknor & Fields, 1995) to give young children a clearer idea of the universe's size and structure, as well as their own places in the physical scheme of things.-John Peters, New York Public Library