Your child has worked through the whole stack and wants the next thing, and you'd like the next thing to be a bit more than thirty-two pages. Here's what I can offer, and I'm going to be straight with you about it first, because this is the page where a lot of parents get sold something that doesn't fit. Who Would Win? is a very specific object: two animals, a fact-off, a verdict. Most books that get recommended after it have the facts and no verdict, which turns out to be the part your child actually came for. Any one of the books here satisfies this path. What the page is really doing is telling you which of these is a real match, which is the right reading level and the wrong shape entirely, and when the honest answer is to go and buy another Who Would Win?
Start with what Who Would Win? actually is, because everything on this page depends on getting that right. It's two animals. It's a run of real facts, honestly compared, one measurement at a time. And then it is a verdict — a staged fight with a winner named on the last page. Those three things together are the appeal, and the third one is doing most of the work. A child reads twenty pages of bite-force statistics because they've been promised a decision. Now look at this shelf. Four of these have no fight and no winner. Weird But True!, 5,000 Awesome Facts, Guinness World Records and Ripley's are all fact bursts with no argument running through them. They are the right reading level and the wrong shape, and I'd rather say that here than pretend they're readalikes and let you find out in a fortnight. Guinness is the nearest of the four, because a record has a competitor attached and your child can sit there working out whether they could beat it. That's an argument, sort of. It still never names a loser. What matches is the two shark books, and the reason is subject rather than structure: a shark is an animal with teeth and jeopardy attached, which is what your child has actually been chasing this whole time. Mike Lowery's is the closer match of the two. It's cartoons and jokes and real science underneath, the pages move as fast as a comparison book does, and it's funny in the way your child already likes. Skerry's is the bigger swing: real photographs, real research, a hundred and ninety-two pages, no jokes, and an argument that runs the other way round, which is that we're the danger and not them. It's the better book. It's the harder sell. And then the thing this page has to say out loud, which is that there are dozens more Who Would Win? titles. A child mid-obsession usually wants the same book again. That isn't a failure of imagination and it isn't something to be steered out of. Buying Lion vs. Tiger and letting them have it is very often the right call, and pretending otherwise is how a parent ends up with forty dollars of abandoned fact books on a shelf.