Seeing Stars

Children's Literature - Kathleen Kelly

Readers may very well find themselves seeing stars as they try to absorb the array of facts presented in this book. Muirden's effort, a loosely related collection of facts about stars, constellations, meteors, and comets, presents the basics of each in an attractively illustrated format. Each double-page spread consists of six to eleven numbered chunks of information, scattered across the pages. Though the format is unusual, it works here: the numbers keep the information in a logical sequence, while the scattered arrangement keeps the text from overwhelming young readers. A good index rounds out the book. The only real detractor is a true-or-false quiz that runs along the side of each page. The questions themselves are intriguing, yet it is unclear until the end of the book that the answers are not to be found in the text, but on the index page. An explanatory note at the beginning would have made this device clever rather than simply confusing.