For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle A very clever alphabet book. As with many alphabet book, this one dedicates one page spread to each letter. The impressive thing is that it also creates a sentences using only words that start with that letter. This is even more remarkable later in the alphabet, especially for x, y, and z. I'll admit some of the sentences are a little weird. "Kitty's kangaroo kicks koalas" was maybe not the best sentence to include. I know there's not a k-verbs. But maybe kisses? I think that may have gone over better than kicks.  Cute illustrations. Some are weird, but overall this is a cute alphabet book.

Basher Science: Extreme Physics - Simon ... Other noteworthy things about this series not mentioned in my review of the Biology book:
Simon Basher, the illustrator, originated this concept series in the UK for Toucan Books, and now published in the US by a Macmillan imprint.
Dan Green is the series writer.
Each title has a scientist consultant, this one James Valles at Brown University.
As with many smaller books, I question the need for a Table of Contents and Index in this series. It seems like one of those things the editors and publishers probably told Basher he needed and he just said OK. It would be interesting to see if this is something that was just added for the US publication

The Nickelodeon voice and anime drawings set the Basher Science series apart from any other science books I've read. The personification (or characterization) was a little annoying because sometimes a character stood in place of an object, and other times in place of a process. I think this series might work better if it actually were game cards and the idea was to play the science rather than read about it. The cartoon drawings don't stand in well for microscope photos and realistic diagrams, and the series doesn't pretend to provide this kind of information. So, again, I think if the series is going to look game-like Basher should just make the game. I found myself engaged in some of the individual pages or chapters, but the book as a whole was not an engaging cover-to-cover read. It would be read best in chunks over time.

Adorable illustrations and lots of fun facts. My students love this one!

Natasha has gone crazy for the Basher series. They are very high-style, high-concept, and high-production values. Plus, weird factoids about the subject in question. I don't know how much real data they provide, but they're cool-looking, combining the cute of anime with slick computer graphics. Of course, most 11-year-olds aren't reading current science research papers, so a good-looking overview is a plus.Natasha's copy.