Tracey Turner (text) & Sally Kindberg (illustrations)
(Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
This big (and indeed fat!) book combines The Comic Strip History of The World, The Comic History of Space and The Comic Strip Greek Myths in one volume. If you have not come across this series before, The Comic Strip offers a great overview of its specific subject in comic-strip style.
The great thing about this series is that it presents information (some of it being quite challenging, like the big bang theory) in a way that is entertaining, humorous and very accessible. It is quite heavy in text, and quite detailed in parts, but accompanied with the cartoon-style illustrations, it is still much easier to access than a bog-standard non-fiction book. This series strikes a great balance, managing to entertain both the reader who might pick it up for a 10 minute reading session and the reader who is really into the specific subject the book is covering. When my son discovered the series with The Comic Strip History of Space, he wasn’t interested in learning about space to begin with, but was hooked by the medium straight away and has loved all the books in the series (including this one, which I had to “steal back” to review).
Unusually for the medium of comic, each individual book includes a contents page, allowing the reader to go straight to a specific section if they so wish, and making it easy to dip in and out of.
This makes it even more accessible for reluctant readers, as it breaks down the book in manageable sections.
The Comic Strip series is a fantastic non-fiction series which will delight fans of factual books as well as fans of comic strip. The Comic Strip Big Fat Book of Knowledge is a great opportunity to discover this series in one handy volume.
All illustrations Ó Sally Kindberg
Many thanks to Bloomsbury Children’s Books for providing a copy of the book.
