Air, Air, All Around (First Facts) - Hardcover

Kindergarten-Grade 2 --Two textbook cases of how not to do children's first science books. While each book has some self-answered riddles and simple experiments, the artless text bunches up far too much information. Air, Air . . . especially reads like an index rather than a book. References to air pollution, sound conveyed through air, meteorology, etc. enlarge the text with too many concepts that fail to hang together. The use of multisyllabic words like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" will cause beginning readers to hyperventilate. Water, Water . . . digresses less, but references such as "surface tension" are far beyond their projected audience. Petach's softly colored, cartoonlike, crayon and pencil illustrations are undistinguished. They often battle the texts for available space and sometimes collide when butted against one another, making it difficult to follow along. David Bennett's Air and Water (both Bantam, 1989) are more verbally and visually attuned to children in this age group. --Gloria Amann, New York Public Library
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