A firework, a firefly and a jar of sauerkraut are the same event.
All three are atoms letting go of each other and taking up new partners. The only real differences are how fast it happens and where the energy comes out. A firework does it in a quarter of a second and gives up light and heat and a bang. A firefly does it in a cold flash, over and over, with almost no heat at all. A jar of cabbage does it for a week in a cupboard and gives you sour food that keeps.
Those three are the book's own examples, and choosing them was the smartest decision anybody involved made.
The book is one of the Graphic Science titles. Max Axiom is the super scientist who fronts the series, and every book in it works the same way: one topic, comic panels, a character who can shrink or fly getting close enough to look at the thing. That is the format, and it is the same format for all of them, so it is worth saying once and then never again. What actually matters is which topic he got. This one is chemistry, which is the subject most likely to go missing from an elementary year entirely.
The science it actually teaches
Reactions are the reason this book is on our Stealth Science shelf, and the reason it is worth more than its price is that most families never cover this at all before ninth grade.
The load-bearing idea is that nothing is created and nothing is lost. A reaction breaks bonds and builds new ones. The atoms that go in are the atoms that come out, in a different arrangement. Burnt toast weighs less than the bread only because some of it left as gas, and if you could catch the gas you would have every atom back. A child who takes that in has the whole of conservation of matter, which is one of maybe five ideas that carry all the way through a science education.
Under that sits the distinction that separates chemistry from everything else. Melting butter is not burning butter. Melt it and you have the same substance in a different state, and you can put it back. Burn it and you have made different substances, and you cannot. A child who can sort a change into those two boxes has done a real piece of chemistry.
Then energy, and this is where children are usually taught only half of it. Reactions run in both directions on heat. Some give it out, which is the fireworks and the fire and the rusting nail that is faintly warm to the touch. Some take it in, and the mixture gets cold on its own with nothing cooling it, which is what a chemical cold pack from a first aid kit is doing. Cold produced by a reaction is deeply strange to a nine year old and it is the fastest way to make chemistry interesting.
The firefly is the best example in the topic. Light with almost no heat, made by two substances meeting inside an insect. Every lamp in your house wastes most of its energy as warmth. A beetle in a jar does not.
Fermentation earns its place because it is slow enough to watch. A reaction that takes a week is a reaction a child can keep a record of, and it is also lunch.
And rate is the practical one. Heat it, break it into smaller pieces, make it stronger, and it goes faster. That is why sugar dissolves quicker in hot tea and why a log burns slower than kindling. It is also the entire reason cooking is a science rather than a set of instructions.
Now the honest part. This is a comic, and a comic panel has room for a claim but not for the working. When the book tells your child that atoms are conserved, that is an assertion in a speech balloon with a picture next to it. Your child is not shown how anybody knows. They are told, by a man in sunglasses, and they believe him because he is the one talking.
For most subjects that would be my whole complaint. Here it barely matters, and this is the thing to understand about which of these books to buy. Chemistry is checkable. Nearly everything asserted in this book can be tested on a kitchen counter by a nine year old within a week of finishing it, using things you already own. The book is not the lesson. It is the starting pistol. That is a completely different kind of value from a book about a planet nobody can touch, and it means you should treat the assertions as a list of things to go and confirm rather than as a set of facts to be learned.
The child it lands with
There is a child who has already worked out that vinegar and baking soda do something and has been doing it in the sink for a year without knowing why. This book is the why, and it arrives at exactly the moment that child will accept it.
Reluctant readers do well here for the obvious reason. A comic is a comic, and a child who will not open a chapter book will finish this in a sitting and then argue with you about it.
The one it does not land with is a child who wants to be told the answer and left alone. This book opens loops on purpose. If nobody in the house is going to follow it up with a bowl and a spoon, it reads as a pile of interesting statements and evaporates in a fortnight.
One place to stop and talk
Do this one with a sandwich bag.
Put a spoonful of baking soda in a zip bag. Get a small amount of vinegar in there too, in a way that keeps the two apart until you want them together, and seal the bag. Weigh it. Then let your child tip it over so the two mix, hold the seal while the bag fills up like a balloon, and weigh it again.
It weighs the same. Now ask where the fizz came from, then ask where it went, then ask why the number on the scale did not move.
The gas is not new material appearing out of nowhere. It is atoms that were already in the powder and the liquid, rearranged into something that will not stay a liquid. Nothing arrived and nothing left, because you did not let anything leave. Then open the bag, let it out, and weigh it a third time. Now it is lighter, and your child can tell you exactly why without any help from you.
That is the most important idea in the book, proven on your counter in six minutes for about eleven cents. The book cannot do that. It can only tell them. You can show them, and once a child has watched a scale refuse to move they do not forget it.
What to know going in
The caution here is not about content, it is about what a child does after the last page. This book is built to make a nine year old want to mix things, and it succeeds. That is a feature, and it means the rule has to be said before the book is opened rather than after.
The rule is that cleaning products are not a chemistry set. Some ordinary things under a kitchen sink release a genuinely dangerous gas when they are combined, and bleach gets mixed with nothing at all, ever. Say it once, flatly, before you hand the book over, and pair it with something they are allowed to do so the answer is not only no.
There is nothing else. Fireworks and explosions are among the examples, so a child already inclined toward blowing things up is being handed encouragement, but the pages are not gruesome and nobody comes to harm in them.
Where to get it
The paperback is $8.99 at The Dynamic World of Chemical Reactions with Max Axiom, Super Scientist.
Agnieszka Biskup also wrote the states of matter title on our shelf, and if you take both, read that one first. A reaction is a rearrangement, and a child gets far more out of the rearranging if they already know what a solid, a liquid and a gas actually are. Matter first, then what happens to it.
The other thing to buy is not a book. It is a box of baking soda, a bottle of white vinegar, a bag of balloons and a red cabbage, which together cost less than the book does and will occupy a week. This is the title with the shortest distance between reading it and doing it, and if you act on only one of these notes, act on this one.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
The Attractive Story of Magnetism: Down to the Electron
The Attractive Story of Magnetism with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Andrea Gianopoulos
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.
