Deserts

Deserts has 4 to 8 year-olds as its target audience. There are lots of neat desert facts, and nice, colorful pictures. It is a difficult topic to cover in a children's book without getting too technical, but I wish there was a bit more geography associated with the desert facts.

Deserts covers a lot of ground. This book explains to children what a desert is, and tells us how much of the earth is actually desert, although there are different kinds. Not many adults know this! The pages that follow depict different unique aspects of the deserts, like rain, flora, fauna, and people of the desert. Children will find the book colorful, there are vocabulary words on the bottom of many of the pages, and craft projects at the end.

Being an adult, it is easy for me to find fault with Deserts, which tries to tackle a complicated topic, and have it be interesting and informative to young children.

I was confused immediately by page one. It is actually page 6. I know why, but does a six year-old? The page numbers are very prominent on the pages! There is a definition of a word on page 1, er, I mean, page 6. Why? On further inspection, every other definition is of a word or phrase that appears on that page. But not page 6. I can't help but wonder if page 6 was edited, deleting the word, but they forgot and left the definition there.

There were two larger issues that bothered me a bit about the book: (1) it doesn't distinguish, on the various pages, where in the world they are discussing. Will my niece in New York think that we have camels in Phoenix, and that we are nomads walking around with water jugs on our heads? (2) I was unclear about the environmental inferences made in the book. Are deserts good or bad? Is it good that cities encroach on deserts? Hmmm.