By Steve Jenkins, Robin Page
A gorgeous cut-paper tour of the world's sharks, from the whale shark the size of a bus to the goblin shark with jaws that shoot out of its face.
Steve Jenkins builds his sharks out of torn and cut paper, and they are so lifelike your child will want to touch the page. This is the fact book for the child who wants range: the whale shark as long as a school bus, the tiny dwarf lantern shark that glows, the great white, the hammerhead, the goblin shark whose jaws snap forward like a trap. It covers how sharks are built to hunt, how their teeth work, how they sense a heartbeat from far away, and it is honest that people are far more dangerous to sharks than sharks are to people. Big art, short text, a fact on every spread to collect.
Two kinds of reader can share this one book. The big, simple line on each spread carries a five year old or a reluctant reader through, while the dense captions underneath reward the eight year old who wants every measurement and diet fact. The art does the pulling either way, so a child reads to find out, not to practice. And because Jenkins names plainly that sharks are the ones in danger from us, it gently turns a teeth-and-terror obsession toward caring about the animal.