Review by Booklist Review
Ages 5-10. In a most original picture book, Schwartz challenges readers to imagine what a million, billion, or trillion of something means, while Kellogg's stunning artwork renders concepts into improbable and entertaining visions, helping to demystify huge numbers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
We all know a million is lots, and we all have trouble visualizing how much. What Schwartz's Marvelossissimo the Mathematical Magician does is give the concept some concrete form in four wide-eyed examples. First, ""If one million kids climbed onto one another's shoulders, they would be. . .farther up than airplanes can fly."" And finally, ""If this book had a million tiny stars, they would fill 70 pages. Climb aboard""--for a balloon trip through just seven star-dotted pages, whereupon a lunch break is declared. As these mind-bogglers may not mean much without comparisons, Schwartz extends the same references to picture a billion (here the human tower ""would stand up past the moon"") and, finally, a trillion, where the pages of stars are now a roll of paper ""stretching from New York to New Zealand."" As proof that this isn't mere wand-waving, an appendix furnishes doubters with the calculations through which Schwartz arrived at his statements. Aside from that, the only numerals in sight are on a pre-title page, in a column showing 1 to 1,000,000 stacked up by factors of ten. This isn't much of an arithmetic lesson, but as an exercise in imagining, it gets a boost from Kellogg, whose pictures always seem to be bursting with stars and extravagance and punctuation-marked wonder. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.