Annu Kilpeläinen: Evolution. A Colouring Book

If you read the blog regularly, you will know that I only write about books I really love. Some books, however, I love a little more than others — and this is one of them. It is, on the face of it, a colouring book. But the subject is Evolution, and what unfolds inside is nothing less than the story of natural selection: from the first sea creatures, through the dinosaurs, all the way to mammals and to us.

The illustrator is the Finnish artist Annu Kilpeläinen. Her line is bold and alive, and the drawings work just as beautifully in plain black and white as they do once a child (or an adult) has filled them in with colour. There is something very generous about a book that is happy in two states at once.

The pages are organised loosely as a timeline. You meet jellyfish and trilobites, then long-necked plant-eaters wading into a swamp, then woolly mammoths under a cold sun, then early humans gathered around a fire. Each spread invites you to slow down and notice the shapes of things — the curl of a fern, the spines of a stegosaurus, the pattern on a moth’s wing — before reaching for your pencils.

What I love most is that the book takes children seriously. It does not flatten the science into something cute. It trusts that a six-year-old can hold the idea of deep time, and it gives them something beautiful to colour while they do.

Annu Kilpeläinen’s other illustration work — editorial pieces, posters, prints — is well worth seeking out too. Evolution is a colouring book that you will want to keep on the shelf long after every page has been filled.