  | Evolution changes everything! (Oliver's Great Big Universe) Author: Cham, Jorge | |
| Price: $21.18 | ||
Summary:
Oliver sets out to raise money for a new computer by writing a book about animals and the origins of life, learning from a retired paleontologist who lives down the street, but things get complicated when his friends want to help with the book.
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews (07/15/25)
School Library Journal (10/01/25)
Booklist (11/01/25)
Full Text Reviews:
School Library Journal - 10/01/2025 Gr 3–5—Oliver, a curious and energetic 11-year-old, has a problem: his hand-me-down computer from the Stone Age can't handle his favorite video game, and now no one wants to play with him On a quest to raise funds for a new computer, Oliver agrees to help out his elderly neighbor, Dr. Beatrice, a retired paleontologist with a chaotic house full of cats and chickens. Frequent comedic illustrations, punny wordplay, and plenty of fart jokes serve as an engaging delivery mechanism for lots of in-depth information about the evolution of life on Earth (which some science-minded readers may find just as interesting as the farts). Oliver learns about evolutionary biology through many odd jobs and zany misadventures on his quest. VERDICT A high-appeal series for kids who have a special interest in science and want something beyond "Dog Man" or "Wimpy Kid." Previous volumes feature astrophysics and Earth science. - Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.
Booklist - 11/01/2025 In a fresh mix of heavily illustrated narrative and inset comics, Cham’s favorite 11-year-old science geek takes a deep dive into the past, with promptings from a neighborhood cat lady, who turns out to be a retired paleontologist. While explaining how natural selection drove the development of life on this planet from the “primordial soup” (not the same as what he concocts for his culinary arts class) to Homo sapiens, the young reporter pauses to marvel at several watershed developments, from the oxygen farting cyanobacteria that gave us our breathable atmosphere to how the descendants of the 60-million-year-old bug-eating miacid evolved into both dogs and cats. Though Oliver shows how “survival of the fittest” works without actually using the term and discusses mutation without ever mentioning genes, he does give both the fossil record and mass extinctions due notice and even, in a closing bonus comic, provides examples of both “secondary” and “convergent” evolution. Readers may never again look at their soup—or their pets—in quite the same way. - Copyright 2025 Booklist.
