By David M. Schwartz
The magician from How Much Is a Million? comes back to explain what money is, where it goes when you put it in a bank, and how interest keeps working on it while you sleep.
Marvelosissimo the Mathematical Magician is back, and this time he's putting you to work. Feed a goldfish, earn a penny. Here's what a penny is, and how many of them make a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar. Take a harder job and the pay goes up, and the piles start climbing: a hundred dollars, a thousand, and finally a million, which Kellogg draws as a stack so tall he calls in a whale to show the scale. Then the magician gets to the part that sticks. You can't lug a million dollars around, so you write a check instead. You can put money in a bank, and the bank pays you for leaving it there, and if you leave it long enough those payments start earning payments of their own. You can borrow money too, and then you're the one paying. At the end he brings up something most books for this age skip: on a big enough income, a chunk of it goes to the government as tax.
This is the book that answers the question sitting under all the others: what is money, and why does anyone take it in exchange for real things? Most books for this age stop at coins and prices. Schwartz keeps going, into checks, banks, interest, compounding, and borrowing, which are the things children watch adults do all the time and rarely hear explained. He earns the right to go there by starting at a penny for feeding a goldfish, so no one gets left behind, and Kellogg's pictures are so crowded and silly that the whole thing plays like a romp instead of a lesson. There's no plot, and it doesn't pretend to have one. What it has is an author's note at the back that shows the math, so a sharp child can check the figures, and some will.