Venus

November 1, 2011

Gr 1-3-These introductions to the planets place short but generally clear physical descriptions, mentions of orbits, year and day lengths, and major moons and rings opposite color photos or (more often) realistic digital images. The texts are so terse that readers may be left frustrated rather than tantalized. For example, in Saturn, one of the planet's moons is described as "shaped like a can of soup!" but it is not identified, and in Uranus, the claim that Uranus's rings "curve around the planet in a different direction than the ones around other planets" goes unexplained. Aside from an only marginally relevant photo of a twirling dancer in Jupiter, each illustration is well chosen but small, with a thick border filling out the remaining page space.

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