By Raman Prinja
A museum of space printed as a book, seven galleries of it, with the biggest and most beautiful pictures of anything on this shelf.
It's laid out as a museum your child walks through, seven galleries in order: space itself, the solar system, the sun, the night sky, stars, galaxies, and the universe. Each gallery opens with a door page and then gives spread after spread of Chris Wormell's woodblock-style pictures, close up on one moon or pulled back across a whole galaxy, with Raman Prinja's text running alongside. Prinja is a professor of astrophysics at University College London and he writes it straight.
Some children have read the facts already and want to be somewhere, and this is their book. The pictures are enormous and drawn rather than photographed, which sounds like a downgrade and isn't: a photograph of a galaxy is a smudge, and Wormell's version shows your child the structure. The text asks something real of them, full paragraphs with no jokes and no cartoon guide, and for a nine-year-old who has been reading down to their level for years, being handed a book that treats them as capable is most of the appeal. It is also, flatly, an object. It's heavy and it looks like it cost something, which is why it works as a present in a way a paperback doesn't.