By Franklyn M. Branley
A plain, orderly fact book on the eight planets, written by a planetarium astronomer for children just starting to read on their own.
This is the straight one. It goes through the eight planets in order, telling you how big each is, how far out it sits, how hot or cold it runs, how long its year lasts, and how it stacks up against Earth. Kevin O'Malley's bright paintings sit next to real photographs from Voyager and other missions, so your child sees both a drawing and the actual thing. At the end there are directions for building a solar-system mobile out of what you already have around the house. Branley ran the Hayden Planetarium, and the writing keeps the same even, steady tone from the first planet to the last.
It gives your child the actual numbers, in order, in sentences short enough to read alone. That's the thing the rhyming space books can't do. It's a Stage 2 book in the series, which means it's built for a child in the early grades who is past picture-book-only and wants the real information. The photographs do more work than you'd expect. Once your child has seen a painted Jupiter and a photographed Jupiter side by side, they understand that someone actually went out there and took the picture.