The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story

★ A Kirkus Best Book of 2021: A Best Informational Picture Book
★ A Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) Best Children’s Book of 2021
★ A Spirituality & Practice Best Spiritual Book of 2021

Based on a real scientific event and inspired by a beloved real human in the author’s life, this is a story about science and the poetry of existence...

The Snail with the Right Heart is a story about time and chance, genetics and gender, love and death, evolution and infinity--concepts often too abstract for the human mind to fathom, often more accessible to the young imagination; concepts made fathomable in the concrete, finite life of one tiny, unusual creature dwelling in a pile of compost amid an English garden. Emerging from this singular life is a lyrical universal invitation not to mistake difference for defect and to welcome, across the accordion scales of time and space, diversity as the wellspring of the universe’s beauty and resilience.

This boldly illustrated book about evolution for children features a large gatefold that opens up to immerse readers in the story and will help kids understand that nature is all about differentiation and that being different is beautiful.

Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring, co-editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the creator and host of The Universe in Verse--an annual charitable celebration of science through poetry at the interdisciplinary cultural center Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.