The Brilliant Deep

Kate Messner's The Brilliant Deep is a true story for 5 year olds about one man who worked out how to grow a coral reef back.

What happens

It opens on a full moon. The corals spawn, millions of tiny lives released at once, until the water swirls like a snow globe. Most get eaten or washed out to sea. One lands somewhere it can grow. That one becomes a reef.

Then the book steps back and tells you about Ken.

Ken grew up near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, watching rockets go up. His dad worked at NASA. Everyone around him was looking at the stars.

Ken kept looking at the sea.

He learned to scuba dive. He kept THIRTY aquariums in his bedroom. The reefs out in the Florida Keys were fire red and murky gold and stuffed with life, and he wanted to know how such tiny creatures could build homes out of rock.

Then came a summer hotter than the rest. The corals lost their colour. There were fewer fish. The sea urchins started dying, and nobody yet understood how badly the reef needed them.

His favourite place in the world was fading and he couldn't do a thing about it.

The turn comes years later, and it's the best part of the book. A coral colony spawned near the rock farm Ken was running, and a few of those tiny lives settled on his rocks and grew. So he and his daughter tried something. Cut a piece off. Stick it on another rock. See what happens.

Then take the grown pieces out to a dying reef and find out whether they hold.

Six coral colonies, each the size of a hand with the fingers stretched out, glued onto bare limestone where a reef used to be. That's the entire experiment. It worked, and his group has now planted tens of thousands.

Reading it aloud is lovely. The sentences are short and almost poem-shaped, with plenty of space around them, and the line about it all starting with one comes back at the end for you both to say together.

It's an easy length for one sitting. There's also a proper facts section at the back about why the reefs are dying and what children can do, which is really for you to read or summarise.

Do know that it's honest about the dying. It doesn't pretend the problem is fixed. For a five year old who has just decided they love the sea, this may be the first time they hear any of that. It's handled very gently and it ends hopeful, which makes all the difference.

What to read next

If it sparks the what-do-you-want-to-be conversation, What Do Scientists Do All Day? opens on a nature reserve with a conservationist, an environmentalist and a zoologist all at work in it.