Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara's introduction to famed British astro-physicist Stephen Hawking is one of the rare positive instalments I have so far encountered in the Little People, Big Dreams series. Presenting a simple but still more than detailed enough portrait of Stephen Hawking's life (from his childhood in Oxford to his stellar university career which even his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis could not hamper and destroy), Stephen Hawking is sufficiently informative to present an extensive biographical narrative of both Stephen Hawking as a family man and as an astro-physicist of talent and renown, as the individual who penned the world-famous A Brief History of Time and yet still simple enough to be enjoyed and appreciated by the intended audience, by the so-called picture book crowd (and indeed, the only and very mild criticism I do have regarding Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara's text is that I really do not understand why in Stephen Hawking, the book that made Hawking famous, his above mentioned A Brief History of Time, is not referred to by title within the narrative itself, is simply called a book that "helped the world understand the meaning of the universe").
Now with regard to Matt Hunt's accompanying illustrations, thankfully and fortunately (as that has sadly only rarely been the case for me with regard to the Little People, Big Dreams series), they are bright, realistically descriptive, historically accurate (read not anachronistic in appearance) and yes indeed, Matt Hunt's pictures, they do work very well both mirroring Maria Sánchez Vegara's printed words and sometimes even expanding a bit on them (such as the illustration of the Hawking family seated at the dinner table, with each of them reading a book, or Stephen Hawking standing in front of a blackboard full of mathematical symbols and formulae, which visually totally underscores that even though with his ALS diagnosis Stephen Hawking's body was basically giving up on him, this did not affect either his mind or his career as a scientist), although I do indeed rather wish that Matt Hunt had rendered his human figures a bit more aesthetically versatile, as the fact that they basically all have almost the exact same facial expressions no matter who they are and not matter if they are male or female, this does make Stephen Hawking, his wife, well, everyone drawn and depicted in Stephen Hawking look rather too much the same and akin countenance and expression wise.