By Franklyn M. Branley
A short science book about what makes the flash and the boom of a thunderstorm, written to settle the child the noise scares.
Branley takes a thunderstorm apart one piece at a time: what lightning actually is, why the flash reaches you before the boom, how counting the seconds between them tells you roughly how far off the storm is, and the safety rules, stay out of the water and keep away from a lone tree in an open field. True Kelley's cartoon diagrams keep it light while the science stays real. It doesn't pretend a storm is nothing; it explains what's going on up there.
A lot of fear of thunder is fear of not knowing what the noise is, and this book trades that for a mechanism a child can follow: charges building in a cloud, light reaching you before sound does. It also hands a child a job, counting the seconds, which for some children helps more than being told there's nothing to worry about. And it's plain about the real danger of lightning, with the safety rules spelled out, so it doesn't come across as hiding anything.