By Joanna Cole
Ms. Frizzle turns the school bus into a weather balloon and rides a growing storm as it becomes a hurricane, so your child watches how one is built from the inside instead of reading about it.
The class is supposed to launch a weather balloon. Instead the bus becomes one, floats up into a growing storm, and rides it as the storm winds itself into a hurricane, in past the wall of clouds to the strange calm eye at the center, then home with a tornado spinning by on the way. This is one of the original fat Cole-and-Degen books, so three things run on every page at once: the story with its jokes and speech bubbles, the class arguing, and taped-on student reports doing the actual science. Those reports explain how warm ocean water feeds a storm, why the winds spin, what the eye is, and how a hurricane and a tornado are alike and how they are not. The plot pulls your child along and the meteorology rides in underneath it, which is why it works for a child who has turned down every plain fact book you've brought home.
The plain reference books show your child a hurricane from outside. This one flies through the middle of one and takes it apart while it goes. Because it's a full original, dense and hand-lettered rather than a thin tie-in, a fact-hungry child can graze the student reports like a small encyclopedia, and the story hands all those facts a shape and a few laughs. A child who won't sit still for straight nonfiction may stay for the ride, and pick up how a hurricane actually works along the way.