Big and Small, Room for All is the first children’s book Toronto’s Gillian Newland has illustrated. Let’s all hope she decides to stick around. Her gorgeous watercolours add immeasurably to the sense of wonder and mystery, the ambitious breadth and scope, of this lovely book. Buttery yellow fields on a summer’s day, the saturated indigo of space, the marmalade cloud of a kitten’s fur – every page is a soft symphony of colour and contrast.

That’s not to downplay the beauty of the text itself. Veteran children’s writer Jo Ellen Bogart uses a series of comparisons – and fewer than a hundred words – to describe in child-friendly terms nothing less exalted than humanity’s place in the cosmos. Her simple rhymes take the reader on a journey from the deep expanse of the universe to the tiny organisms revealed under a microscope. “Big sky, Small Sun” leads to “Big Sun, Small Earth,” and so on down through mountain, tree, man, child, kitten, and flea.

At the end the book, we are back out in the “never-ever-ending sky,” gazing with wonder at Newland’s delicate colour washes of clouds and stars. Stunning.