Reviews of space-themed books for children

Books for middle schoolers (8-13ish)

Awesome Space Robots, by Michael O'Hearn, opens with the scene of Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon for the first time -- but then says that robots got to the Moon much earlier. It describes how engineers consider the problems we want robots to solve, and the scientific questions we want answered, before designing and testing their robots, and it talks about some of the challenges about designing robots for space, all with excellent pictures. I, of course, think space robots are awesome, and I'm happy to see Spirit, Curiosity, Hubble, Canadarm 2, Voyager, Cassini, Viking, Pathfinder, Pioneer 10, and MAVEN all make appearances in images, and many more are mentioned in the text. All in all, an excellent overview of robotic exploration for kids.

Mars Rover Driver: The Coolest Jobs on the Planet, by Scott "@marsroverdriver" Maxwell with Catherine Chambers, is a really fun first-person profile of, well, a Mars rover driver. It's not exactly a biography, more a book of vignettes and facts ranging from his schooling and career path to "Did you know?" facts about different space gizmos to "Note to self" items about things he learned on the job. As such, it's a bit scattered, but the short, self-contained nuggets on each page would make this book an excellent one to put in front of a reluctant reader, and taken together it really provides a lot of insight into what makes the work of a software developer on a space mission fun and challenging. My main complaint about the book is with the photo selection -- there are many places where photos from the Curiosity mission are paired with text about Spirit and Opportunity, and other odd choices. And, particularly in a book about careers, I would have liked to see at least one woman or person of color in one of the several photos containing humans.

I was really excited to see that Basher books was coming out with Basher Basics: Space Exploration this year; my daughter loves the Basher science series, reading each book over and over again. It's typical of the series, presenting space robots and phenomena as fun, cartoon-ized characters with distinct personalities, and my daughter has eaten it up. I do have to say I'm disappointed in its length: at 64 pages it's only half as long as earlier titles, which means that there's hardly room to mention more than a handful of space missions by name. It's not much cheaper than the 128-page titles, either. "Basics" tips you off that it's a 64-page book; "Basher Science" books are longer. I would have loved to see a cartoony treatment of more of my robot friends in space, and a 128-page version would have allowed the author (Dan Green) to make a pretty exhaustive list. If you don't have any books in the Basher series yet, go with Basher Science: Astronomy, which profiles as many space missions. (I checked: there is overlap in cartoon drawings, but at least they did not self-plagiarize the text.) All that being said, my daughter was pretty stoked to see Space Exploration, so it's a good addition to an existing Basher collection. She recommends Basher Basics: Weather and Basher Science: Technology, too.

The Women of Apollo, by Robyn Friend, tells biographies of four women who served as engineers during the Apollo program: Ann Dickson, Ann Maybury, Bobbie Johnson, and Judith Love Cohen. Each had a different path to her engineering career, and three of the four paused their careers to have children and then returned to work on Apollo. Several had parents who disapproved their educational paths, but they did it anyway, and succeeded. I like how these biographies show different paths to making important contributions to a grand program -- I can see myself as a girl reading these stories, trying on the personalities they explore, saying yes--that's me; no--I wouldn't do it that way, all the while imagining myself an engineer on a space program, figuring out the trajectory to the Moon or helping save the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts. A chunk of the back of the book is devoted to somewhat random "fun facts" -- I wish there had been a fifth biography instead. I also dislike the illustrations, which are ugly and seem to have been produced in Microsoft Paint; photographs would have been a much better choice.

Those are all the books for kids from this year's stack. I've got a bunch of fun toys to review, too; I'll do that in a separate blog post.