Cover reveal for MAKING MORE — Now available for pre-order!

At long last, after so many months (and years!) of work, this moment is finally here: my next picture book, Making More: How Life Begins, is now available for pre-order. It's big, it's brave, and it's sure to be banned. I can hardly wait to share life's story with readers!

If you follow me on social media you know that I spent the first few months of this year locked away in my studio trying to finish this book. There were 70-hour work weeks, sleepless nights, sick kids and COVID quarantines, but I managed to keep up with each successive checkpoint and delivered the final jacket art to my publisher in June. Making More will hit shelves in six months on March 7, 2023, wherever books are sold, and I've never felt quite this mixture of nerves and excitement all at once. This book is about the science of reproduction in the wild—how living things must meet and merge their DNA to make something new—and at 72 pages long it's my biggest project yet. There are spreads on genes, sperm and eggs, internal fertilization (hello rabbits!), embryonic growth, and change over time, and it's groundbreaking in children's book publishing for the breadth and candor of its content. This topic hasn't ever been done like this before!

"Lucid, informed, and illuminated by beautiful paintings, Making More weaves a story that seamlessly explains life’s most fundamental process, answers children’s questions, and provides an essential tool for parents, caregivers, and educators."

Is this project a bit of a left turn from my books about sharks and elephants? Perhaps. But when I visited elementary schools in 2018 and 2019 for my book How to Be an Elephant, students would constantly raise their hands and ask me how a baby elephant gets out of its mom. This question popped up over and over again, across different grade levels, in multiple states. I was struck that so many kids didn’t know basic information about how life begins or where they came from. "But how did the egg get inside the mom? Did she have to eat the egg to make the baby?" YIKES. I had to do something, and I knew that I could answer those students best with a book. I wanted parents like me to have a tool that cut through taboos and answered questions while meeting their kids' curiosity with joy and wonder.

Making More is my answer to the kids who raised their hands. Every living thing has parents, and the process of how that happens is a story worth sharing. It is rich. It is wild. It's the story of life on Earth. Thank you in advance for supporting this book and helping to spread the word about Making More! Pre-order your copy today!