We are the Solar System: My 4.6-Billion-Year Family Story

One of us is enormous. The rest of us are rounding errors. The Solar System has been here for four and a half billion years. It was present for all of it — the collapse, the fire, the crashing, the long slow settling. And it understood almost none of it.

Then something opened its eyes on the third planet and started asking questions.

This is the Solar System's own story, told in its own voice — warm, funny, and endlessly curious about the strange species that finally figured out where it came from and told it.

Inside, young readers will find out: Why Earth has a Moon, and why that was the worst day in its history — and the luckiest How the giant planets got up and moved , and why Mars ended up small because of it Where every drop of the ocean came from, and how we can tell Why Venus and Earth started out identical and ended up nothing alike How you can measure the distance to the Moon by bouncing a laser off a mirror left there by hand Where the Solar System actually ends — and why there are three defensible answers This book tells the truth about what isn't known. When scientists disagree — about the bombardment, about what tipped Uranus over, about whether Venus ever had oceans — it says so plainly, and explains both sides. Young readers come away understanding that science is an argument that gets better over time, not a list of facts to memorize.

Twenty chapters. Twenty-two diagrams and illustrations. Plus a glossary, a timeline, a section on how we know every major claim in the book, and a list of things a curious kid can go outside and see tonight without a telescope.

Factual. Apolitical. Genuinely funny.

Ages 8–11 · Grades 3–6