By Jason Chin
A girl pulls a book about coral reefs off a library shelf, opens it, and the library floods.
She is in a city library. She takes a book down and starts reading, and water begins coming in around the stacks. A few pages later the shelves are coral heads, there are fish going past the card catalog, and she is swimming. Then Chin simply teaches you the reef. That coral is an animal. That the reef is built on the skeletons of the dead coral underneath it. That the living part runs on algae lodged inside the polyps, trading food for shelter. That reefs make islands. Sharks come through, and a moray. She surfaces on a beach that used to be the library steps, walks home wet, and hands the book to another child on the way. The back matter explains how reefs are built and what bleaching is.
Chin does the thing where a book about a place is also a book about reading about a place, and it works because the science underneath is real and never watered down for anybody. Your child comes out knowing that coral is an animal building a rock out of its own dead relatives, which is a far stranger and better fact than reefs are pretty and we should save them. It is the most beautiful thing on this shelf and it also has the most information per page, which is a combination almost nobody manages.