Why iron and not aluminium?
That question is what separates this book from every other magnet book written for a nine year old. The others stop at what magnets do. This one goes after why, and the answer lives down at the electron, so that is where the book goes. A comic is an odd place to try it. It tries anyway, and the trying is what you are paying for.
The rest is the usual Graphic Science furniture: full colour panels, a superhero scientist who shrinks to any size the page requires, a glossary and an index in the back, an afternoon to read.
The science it actually teaches
Start where every magnet book starts, because it has to. Two poles, and the ends are not interchangeable. Push like ends together and they shove back at you. Turn one round and they snap. The force acts across a gap with nothing in between doing the work, which is a genuinely strange idea and the foundation of a great deal of later physics.
Then the sorting, which is where most children get corrected. Iron answers a magnet. Aluminium does not. Copper does not. Most of the shiny metal in a kitchen drawer does not. A child who believes magnets pick up metal finds out in four seconds that magnets pick up one particular kind of metal, and the drawer does the correcting rather than you.
So far this is standard, and our note on Amazing Magnetism, the Magic School Bus chapter book, covers the same ground for a younger reader with the whole thing testable at your own table.
Here is where this book goes further. It asks why iron and not aluminium, and it goes to the electron for the answer. Electrons are themselves tiny magnets. In most materials they point every which way and cancel each other out. In iron they can line up in patches, and when enough patches point the same way you have a magnet you can hold. That is why hitting a magnet hard can weaken it, and why heating one can wreck it: you have knocked the patches out of line. Very few books at this level will say any of that, and a child who has it can answer questions that a child who has only seen paper clips move cannot.
Then electromagnetism, which the book carries with the crane. Send current through a coil of wire and you have made a magnet. Cut the current and it stops being one, and whatever the crane was holding drops. Electricity and magnetism turn out to be one subject rather than two, and a child who understands that switch understands every motor and every doorbell in the house.
And the planet. The Earth is a magnet, which is why a compass needle swings and then settles. The needle is not reading the map it is lying on and it is not reading the ground under your boots. It is answering something the size of a world, and a child with that will never again think of a compass as a gadget.
The child it lands with
Has your child already asked why?
That is the whole test for this book. The child who has played with magnets, worked out what they do, and then said but why does it do that is exactly who this was written for, and there is very little else at this reading level that will take the question seriously.
It also suits the older end of the band better than most of the series. A twelve year old who bounced off magnets as a baby topic in third grade can come back here and find there was a floor under it after all.
The child who wants to build things will take the crane pages and want a nail, a battery and some wire, which is the correct response.
One place to stop and talk
Stop where Max shrinks.
Look at the electrons lining up, then say the honest thing: nobody drew you the rest of this, and there is a rest. Then ask what would happen to a magnet if you shook the lines back out of order, and let your child work out from the picture in front of them why an old magnet on a fridge is weaker than a new one.
What to know going in
The comic format strains hardest exactly where this book is bravest, and that is worth knowing before you hand it over.
The electron section is one or two panels of arrows lining up. That picture is true. It is not a worked explanation, and it cannot be, because there is no room in a speech balloon for why an electron behaves like a magnet in the first place. A curious child will finish those pages and ask a follow up question that the book has no answer to, and if you do not know the answer either, the useful move is to say so rather than to change the subject. That is a fair trade for a book that at least pointed at the right place. It is still a limit, and a child who wants the working will feel the page end.
There is a second thing, and it is practical rather than literary. This book will make your child want magnets. Small strong magnets are genuinely dangerous if a young child swallows them, and two of them are far worse than one, because they can find each other through the wall of the gut. If there is a toddler in the house, buy the book and control the magnets. Nothing in here warns you about that, so this note does.
Nothing frightening is on the page. No death, no peril. The reading is easy, the ideas are not, and the ideas are the reason to own it.
Where to get it
The paperback is $8.99 at The Attractive Story of Magnetism with Max Axiom, Super Scientist.
If you already own Amazing Magnetism, the Magic School Bus chapter book, this is the step up rather than a repeat, and the overlap in the first half is worth paying for to get the electron in the second. If you own neither and your child is seven or eight, start with the Magic School Bus one and come back here in a year or two. If your child is ten and has already run out of patience with magnet books, start here, because this is the one that finally answers the question the others left sitting. Both sit on the Stealth Science shelf.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Chemical Reactions with Max Axiom: Firework, Firefly, Jar
The Dynamic World of Chemical Reactions with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Agnieszka Biskup
Grade 4 to 8
States of Matter with Max Axiom: Read It in the Kitchen
The Solid Truth about States of Matter with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Agnieszka Biskup
Grade 4 to 8
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Was Albert Einstein? The Science Behind the Hair
Who Was Albert Einstein? by Jess Brallier
Grade 2 to 5
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.
