Karen Krossing’s 2026 nonfiction picture book One Cosmic Rock is a rare and ambitious book. The book’s subtitle points readers to both the rarity and the ambition: The Story of the Asteroid that Changed Our World.
In other words, this is the story of the asteroid that hit Earth, drove dinosaurs largely extinct, and changed the evolutionary path of life on this planet. Necessarily, this book covers a loooong stretch of time, starting millions of years before humans evolved. Structurally, the book falls into several sections: the introduction of the asteroid and time scale, snapshots of a dinosaur planet, the impact (which includes some nice ghostly outlines of dinosaurs in white against the gray background of ash and death), and adaptation in the wake of death. This section leads through the rise of mammals, and ends up with humans emerging.
This is a good introduction to planetary and biological evolution. (It would work well with Frog.) It covers ancient trauma intelligently.
Julia Vasileva’s illustrations are varied and colorful. They are sometimes literal, and sometimes metaphorical (like the image of parent and child late in the book, which is a silhouette filled with stars and nebulae).
Two pages at the book’s end give background, vocabulary, and a brief list of sources.
