Welcome to my annual reviews of space books for children! There was a bumper crop of space-related books for children this year; I received dozens of books for review by publishers and bought a few more to supplement my fiction recommendations. Each book illustrated on this page is the one I recommend for purchase.
This year I was particularly interested in updating my 6 and 9 year old public school library with factual non-fiction they could use for planet reports, so you’ll find these books first. Then I’ll move on to more general recommendations, categorized by age group. Books can cover ages, of course, so depending on what age you’re buying for, you might want to look in the adjacent age group for more suggestions. And the section for ages 12 and up includes plenty of books aimed at a general audience, not just kids.
I had so many books to review this year that this article needs a table of contents, so here it is:
Multi-volume non-fiction book series
In a previous post, I talked about disposing of old outdated books and the desperate need for updated books on Mars and Mercury. As I sifted through stacks of new books for the school library, I kept these questions in mind:
- Are there any major factual errors?
- Does it provide “wow” facts in addition to dry numbers and dates?
- Is he discussing recent science?
- Does it talk about things we don’t yet understand, questions that motivate us, why we need to keep exploring?
- Are the images well chosen to match the text?
- Is the exploration section up to date?
- Does the exploration section mention international missions, not just NASA ones?
Obviously, not every book can do it all, especially books for young readers, but some were better than others. Here are some books I can recommend, although some are recommended with reservations.
I reviewed three series of multi-volume books on the planets and other elements of the solar system. Of these, I can recommend two, one from Capstone and one from Scholastic. Both are aimed at ages 7-10, although I think they would still have some use for older children. For both series, the books are written by multiple authors, and not all books in the series are of the same quality. In particular, I found the Mars and Earth books in both series to be somewhat weak compared to the others. Both series include recent Keck Adaptive Optics images of Uranus and Neptune and explain how the two worlds have changed since Voyager 2 explored them. Overall, I have a slight preference for the Capstone series, even though the two series were very close to each other in quality.