By Gail Herman
Ms. Frizzle drives the class to the bottom of the ocean and watches a volcano build a brand-new island right under them, all in cartoon and played for laughs.
The bus heads down to the sea floor, because that's where Ms. Frizzle has decided a volcano lesson should start, and the class watches an undersea volcano build an island from the bottom up. Magma pushes through a crack in the ocean floor, cools in the water, hardens, and does it again, and again, until there's land where there was nothing. Then the eruption catches the bus and the class rides it out. Arnold complains the whole time. Off in a corner box, somebody's chart lays out how the plates move, while the main picture has a school bus on fire in it. The science is real and it comes in sideways, tucked between a joke and a talking lizard, so a child who'd never sit still for a straight fact book picks up how plate tectonics works along the way.
If your child loves the idea of volcanoes but won't go near a fact book about them, this is the one. It's the only book on the subject that's genuinely funny, and it's the gentlest by a wide margin. Nothing in it is real, so nothing in it can have happened to anybody, and the eruption is a cartoon eruption that a bus survives. It's the book for the age where volcanoes are thrilling and Pompeii would be a mistake. The other reason it earns its place is the story itself. This volcano builds an island instead of wrecking a town, and for a child who thinks a volcano is nothing but destruction, watching one make something can shift the whole picture.