By National Geographic Kids
One weird fact per page, in a paperback small enough to live in a coat pocket.
A hippo's milk is pink. Peanut butter can be squeezed into a diamond. The oldest pet goldfish on record made it to forty-three. That is the whole shape of the book: one fact, one page, one photograph, enormous type, three hundred and fifty times over. There is no first chapter and no last one. Your child opens it wherever their thumb landed, reads eleven words, makes a noise, and turns the page.
The object itself is doing the work. It is small, it is soft-covered, it costs almost nothing, and a page holds one sentence. So the question your child is answering when they pick it up isn't will I read this book, it's will I read this line. That is a question nobody says no to. And because there's no order, there's no place to lose your page and no way to fall behind, which means a child can put it down for a month and pick it up with nothing lost. It fits in a pocket, a car door, a bag, the gap beside the sofa cushion. Wherever it ends up is a place a book has never been in your house before.