By Darlyne Murawski, Nancy Honovich
The giant bug reference a truly obsessed child will disappear into for hours at a time.
This is the big one, a fat reference packed with hundreds of insects and their relatives, from butterflies and beetles to spiders, scorpions, and centipedes. Every kind gets sharp close-up photographs, a fact file, and the strange, brilliant details: how it eats, how it defends itself, where in the world it lives. There are maps, records for the biggest and fastest, and little activities scattered through. It is not a book to read front to back. It is one your child dives into and surfaces from an hour later.
Your child has gone all the way from liking bugs to needing to know every single one, and this is the reference they will keep for years. It is real National Geographic science, so the facts are the good stuff, and it is built for browsing, whether they are looking up the beetle they found on the path or just flipping until something amazing stops them. It grows with them, from you reading fact files aloud now to them poring over it alone later.