By Anne Schreiber
A Level 2 reader packed with full-page photographs of real eruptions and sentences short enough for a six-year-old to finish, and the lava turns up on page one.
It starts where a volcano-obsessed child wants it to start: molten rock forcing its way up through a crack in the Earth and bursting out the top. Then Schreiber backs up and explains. What the crust is, why it breaks, where all that hot rock was before it got here. She goes through what an eruption actually throws out, the ash and the lava and the smoke, and sorts volcanoes into three kinds, active, dormant, and extinct. There are famous eruptions too: Mount St. Helens blowing out its own side in 1980, and Vesuvius burying the city of Pompeii. The pictures are the National Geographic kind, meaning real, the full size of the page, and shockingly orange. A table of contents, photo captions, and vocabulary words pulled out in small boxes give a new reader the hard words up front instead of leaving them to trip over them.
This is a Level 2 reader, pitched at about the end of second grade, so the sentences are short and the type is large. None of that reads as school, because a photograph of an erupting mountain doesn't look like a worksheet. It's also the shortest way into the subject and the least alarming one: thirty-two pages, no plot to hold in your head, no chapter to lose your place in. What your child gets is the chance to be the expert on something real while they practice reading, and mostly they won't notice the practice part.