The Coziest Place on the Moon

From Marginalian creator Maria Popova and acclaimed illustrator Sarah Jacoby comes this gorgeous picture book about the dark side of the moon, and creative solitude as an antidote to loneliness.

A Publishers Weekly Big Indie Children’s Book of Fall 2025!

Feeling like the loneliest creature on Earth, Re decides to go live in the coziest place on the moon. Re packs a suitcase and takes off on a beam of light, shooting out into the cosmic aloneness of space.

Re’s aim is to go into the cozy nook that the moon is said to possess. But shortly after arriving, Re makes a surprising discovery: Re is not alone. Indeed, another lonely soul has beaten Re there! And so, Re meets Mi, and while each lives in their own chamber of the nook, these two single souls still become, at times, a kind of togetherness.

Each remains alone but less lonely, and now each can watch over the solitude of the other. Moreover, on certain nights, the solitary songs of them both might be heard cadencing the night together, in harmony, across the vast and starry sky.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning--sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, and has spent ample happy hours making An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and one other very short book besides The Coziest Place on the Moon (The Snail with the Right Heart), and her show The Universe in Verse--a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry--has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn. Sarah Jacoby is the award-winning author and illustrator of such picture books as Doris, Can I Sit with You?, and Forever or a Day. Her work is mostly book-oriented these days, though she has worked with folks like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Jacoby’s work is evocative and delightfully unexpected, playful and effortlessly profound. Her work is characterized by a deeply felt empathy, a keenly observant eye, and an intuitive ability to capture and convey what it means to think, feel, and be in this world as a human. She lives and works in a little row home in Philadelphia.