By Mike Lowery
A cartoonist's pile of real shark facts, the tiny ones and the enormous ones and the gross ones, with a joke on just about every page.
Sharks come tinier than a banana and longer than a bus, and Mike Lowery has drawn a hundred and twenty-eight pages of exactly that kind of fact. A whale shark carries something like three thousand teeth. Ambergris, which Lowery cheerfully calls whale-vomit perfume, really is an ingredient in perfume. He walks through the actual shark families and explains the ampullae of Lorenzini, the jelly-filled pores a shark uses to sense your heartbeat through the water. Then he wanders off into a gallery of the ocean's strangest animals, a run of jokes, and a step-by-step for drawing a hammerhead in six moves. The sharks talk the whole way through.
It works on the child who reads for the jokes and tolerates the facts to get to them. Nothing on the page asks for more than fifteen seconds or so before something changes, so a reluctant reader can get through a whole nonfiction book without quite noticing they did. And the science holds up. It's real and correctly explained, not dumbed down to mush. The drawing pages matter more than they look: reading about a shark turns into making one, which is often the difference between a book that gets read once and a book that lives on the desk with a pencil next to it. Lowery is also making a quiet point throughout, that sharks come off far worse in a run-in with people than people do, and he's funny enough about it that it never tips into a lecture.