The Words in Picture Books: The Snail With the Right Heart by Maria Popova

The Snail With the Right Heart by writer and much-beloved blogger Maria Popova takes on gender and genetics, love and death, evolution and the surprise of unexpected mutations, in the same way that Marion Dane Bauer’s The Stuff of Stars engages with cosmology and evolution and the big, beautiful questions of who we are and why it matters.

Popova’s book scales from incomprehensibly vast…

“Long ago, before half the stars that speckle the sky were born…”

…to carefully particular:

One autumn day a cosmic blink ago, a human –a retired scientist from London's natural history Museum —stopped mid-stride on his walk when he noticed a most unusual garden snail in a pile of compost.

The words breathe life on the page into the real-life story of Jeremy, a rare garden snail with a shell spiralling to the left, meaning internally reversed anatomy as well, thus the “right heart” of the title. Popova’s tender text joins with Ping Zhu’s lushly gorgeous illustration to create a love song to difference, a tribute to survival and longing and the right to be.