Stretch a rubber band across an open shoebox. Pluck it. Now pull it tighter with one finger and pluck again. The note goes up.
That takes ten seconds. This book is the twenty minutes that belongs either side of it.
Max Axiom is a scientist in a comic who can shrink to any size he likes, and in this one he shrinks small enough to ride a sound wave. Full colour panels, speech balloons, glossary and index in the back. That is the Graphic Science format, and every Max Axiom note on our shelf has to say so once, so this one has now said it and will spend the rest of its time on sound.
The science it actually teaches
Four things, and it gets all four right.
Sound is a push. Something moves, the air beside it gets squeezed, that squeeze shoves the air beside it, and the shove travels. Nothing is flying across the room. The air stays roughly where it was and passes the push along. A child holding that idea works out in one step why there is no sound in space, and why an ear laid flat on a table hears a tapped finger that the same ear misses from a chair.
Pitch is how often the push repeats. Volume is how hard it pushes. Those are two separate dials, and almost every child arrives believing they are one dial, because the loud things at a fairground happen to be shrill as well. Getting a child to work out that a whisper can be high and a shout can be low is the most useful correction in this book. The rubber band settles it in a minute: pluck harder for volume, tighten for pitch, and neither move touches the other.
An echo is the same push coming back off a wall, arriving late. The lateness is the useful part. If you know how fast sound travels, the delay tells you how far off the wall is. That is a bat. That is sonar. That is a fishing boat finding the bottom. All of it arithmetic done on a delay.
And what the sound is travelling through changes how fast it goes. Water carries it faster than air, and steel faster still, because the particles sit close enough to pass the shove along without waiting.
That is a real physics load for eight dollars and a comic.
The child it lands with
The nine year old who will not sit down with a science textbook and will lie on the floor with a comic for an hour. That child is not avoiding science. They are avoiding a wall of paragraphs, which is a different complaint and a fair one.
A musician's child, too. Anyone who has been told to tune a string has already met frequency without the word, and this book hands them the word.
The one who takes a toy apart to find where the noise lives will get more out of the echo pages than the grade band suggests.
One place to stop and talk
Do not read the page about pitch. Play it.
Get the shoebox and the rubber band onto the table before you open the book, so the thing is already sitting there. At the pitch pages, stop and hand the band over. Ask for a loud low note. Then a quiet low note. Then a loud high one. Making a child produce all four on demand forces them to find the two separate controls with their own hands, and once they have found them they cannot unfind them.
Then put an ear flat on the table and tap the far end of it with a pencil. Sit up and tap it the same way again. The difference is the medium, and it is much louder than any sentence about the medium.
What to know going in
This is where the comic format costs you something, and it is worth saying plainly because it is true of the series and not only this book.
A panel has room for a claim. It has no room for the working. The line "frequency is what makes a note high" fits in a speech balloon over a drawing of a wave, and that sentence is correct, and it is not an explanation. A child can finish this book able to repeat four accurate statements about sound and unable to do a thing with any of them. If nothing gets plucked, tapped or listened to afterwards, you bought a pleasant twenty minutes rather than a physics lesson.
The superhero framing has the same shape of problem. Max is never wrong, never surprised, and never has to try anything twice. Sound behaves for him. It will not behave that neatly on your kitchen table, and the gap is fine as long as somebody says out loud that the table is the real one.
Nothing frightening is in here. No death, no peril worth naming. The reading is easy and the ideas underneath it are not, which is the usual trap with a comic: a seven year old can read every word on the page and come away with only the pictures.
Where to get it
The paperback is $8.99 at Adventures in Sound with Max Axiom, Super Scientist.
If you are testing one Max Axiom book to see whether the format suits your child, make it this one. Not because it is the best written of them, but because it is the cheapest to follow up. The other Max Axiom titles on the Stealth Science shelf all need something you have to go and fetch. This one needs a rubber band and a box you already own, which means you will actually do it.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Decoding Genes: Where the Comic Format Runs Out of Room
The Decoding Genes with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Amber J Keyser
Grade 4 to 8
Investigating the Scientific Method: The Odd One Out
Investigating the Scientific Method with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Donald B Lemke
Grade 4 to 8
Mrs. Frisby: The One With a Real Plot
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C O'Brien
Grade 4 to 7
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
