I should have been prepared for the emotional sequence of images on the sixth double-page spread of Life After Whale. It’s not a secret. The title reveals the plot: Life After Whale.  

But I wasn’t prepared. I let Chin’s immersive cover, front matter, and opening scenes — a sequence of full-bleed illustrations painted predominantly in shades of blue — pull me into the aquatic life of a blue whale. Chin’s invitation begins with the wrap-around cover on which a submerged blue whale stretches from mouth (on the front) to tail (on the back). He shows off her textured skin markings, bathes her in sunlight, and surrounds her with dolphins, sharks, and schools of fish. Attentive readers might catch a glimpse of her right eye, tiny relative to her massive body. Her eye is an important detail, but readers don’t know that yet.  

Inside the book, the dark, sea-blue endpapers welcome readers into the whale’s habitat. On the half-title page, the whale surfaces. She blows a misty white spout that sprays beyond the title and blends with the clouds. Next, on the full title page, the whale’s tail, and its waterfall-like splash, occupies most of the double-page spread. Brunelle’s verbal narrative hasn’t even started yet, but Chin has already forged a connection. The whale seems healthy here, as well as on the next few spreads. As the narrative begins, the whale swims, eats, and “lunges!” Readers will likely notice the book’s first splotches of pink against the blue backdrop, but they might not recognize the nourishing krill as another example of Chin’s visual foreshadowing.

And then, as the words of the title promise, Brunelle and Chin deliver the news that “today something is different.” On the verso, Chin paints three slightly irregularly shaped blue rectangles with fuzzy borders amidst a white background. These snapshots show the passage of time. In the first image, the whale’s squinted but still open eye demands attention. She is dying. In the middle image, Chin zooms in. Her eye is closed tighter, and the magnified view accentuates a curvy web of wrinkles above her eye that the reader might have missed in the prior image. In the final snapshot, only her fully shut eye and a single thread of her wrinkles fit in the frame. Chin places each snapshot lower on the page, increasingly closer to the reader. The placement of the text, too, enhances the visual tension, with five sentences below the first image, three sentences below the second image, and one unfinished sentence under the third image that reads: “This year, this day, this moment, after ninety years of life, as all living things must do at some point...” 

On the recto, Chin delivers a gut-wrenching, full-bleed image of the whale, fully submerged, still bathed in sunlight, but now arched belly-up and head down, with the words, “she dies” in white text. Chin points her head away from the page-turn, and in doing so, he offers a pause, a moment of respect and grief. The reader can linger on the whale’s closed eye on the verso or mourn her sinking body on the recto. They can look up toward the sunlit surface, or down toward the darker ocean depths. This single spread exemplifies Chin’s Caldecott-worthy art. He honors Brunelle’s honest prose, the blue whale, and the child reader, with detailed, realistic, dramatic paintings.

But the book has only just begun, and on the next spread, Brunelle announces that the new ecosystem, prompted by the whale’s death “starts right away.” Throughout the book, in which readers discover the cyclical ecosystem of a whale fall, Chin’s illustrations balance visual storytelling with scientific paintings, acknowledging and satisfying the reader’s simultaneous interest in both. On most double-page spreads, Chin’s full-bleed art occupies three quarters of the page, while white side bars make space for Brunelle’s well-written, text-rich narrative and Chin’s more instructional renderings.  

Chin’s predominantly blue paintings showcase his exceptional mastery of watercolor and gouache. Readers appreciate every line and every variation of blue, as he reveals the ridges and spots of the whale’s unique skin patterns; her lively or dying eyes; choppy or calm waves; bubbly, streaming, or misty splashes; wispy, barely visible breaths of air from blowholes; or clouds of sand disrupted from the whale’s forceful seafloor landing. When Chin adds color, it serves both narrative and instructional purposes. Throughout the book, readers learn about the cyclical process that moves from blue whale, to whale fall, to phytoplankton, to krill, and back to blue whale. Toward the end of the book, a “hungry young blue whale” gulps a mouth full of pink krill, the reader learns, that originated from the decomposed protagonist. If you line up this spread with the one described above — I tried! — you’d discover that the two whales take up almost the same picture space. While Chin offers a scientific, circular diagram in the side bar next to the young whale, he also paints pink splotches of krill surrounding the whale. By connecting the pink krill at the beginning of the book to this pink krill, and lining up the deceased and the young whales, Chin’s art expresses this full circle moment. 

It's been almost fifty years since the Horn Book published Milton Meltzer’s 1976 plea, “Where Do All the Prizes Go? The Case for Nonfiction.” Since then, The Caldecott Medal has been awarded to numerous nonfiction picture books, but primarily to narrative biographies. For his distinguished paintings that depict the ecosystem of a whale fall, and for his recognition that a child audience deserves exceptional visual storytelling and scientific exposition, and for his insistence that the two styles can coexist exquisitely, perhaps it’s time to revive Meltzer’s plea and make the case for a scientific nonfiction picture book, for this scientific nonfiction picture book. 

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Life After Whale]