You cannot put a planet on a bench.
That is the whole difficulty. Nearly everything else in a fourth grade science year can, in principle, be checked at home. Plants, water, magnets, air, heat. This cannot. Nobody has ever watched a fault let go. Nobody ever will, because it happens miles down in solid rock and the only thing that reaches the surface is the shaking. Everything anybody knows about earthquakes was worked out backwards, from instruments sitting on the outside of a thing they cannot open.
The book does not mention any of that. What the book does is hand a nine year old a tidy set of correct statements about faults, waves, magnitude and plates, in comic panels, delivered by Max Axiom, the super scientist who fronts the Graphic Science series. It is a good short primer and the format does what comics do for a reluctant reader, which is get them to the last page.
It is also the title in this set where I would push back hardest, and the reason is worth the next few paragraphs.
The science it actually teaches
The topic is real earth science and it earns its place on our Stealth Science shelf, so let me lay out what is actually in play before I complain about how it is delivered.
Start with the fault. Two enormous blocks of rock are pressed together along a seam and they are stuck. The forces that move plates keep pushing anyway, so the rock bends and stores the strain, sometimes for a human lifetime. Then friction loses, the blocks jump past each other in a few seconds, and all the strain that took a century to build comes out as shaking. That is an earthquake. It is not a hole opening. It is a stuck edge letting go.
Then the waves, which is the part most books skip and which is the most interesting thing on the list. The shaking does not arrive as one thing. A fast wave gets to you first, and it is the one that rattles the windows and gets the dog up. A slower wave arrives behind it, and that one is the one that knocks buildings down. The gap between them is not a curiosity. It is the measurement. The further you are from where the rock slipped, the more the fast wave outruns the slow one, so the size of that gap tells a station how far away the source was.
Which sets up the trick that a child will actually enjoy. One station knows a distance, not a direction, so all it can say is that the earthquake happened somewhere on a circle. Two stations narrow it to two points. Three circles cross in one place. That is how the dot ends up on the map on the news within minutes, and it is done with arithmetic a fifth grader can follow.
Then magnitude, and this one is worth arguing about at your table. The number is not a count of anything. It is a compressed scale, so each whole step up is roughly ten times the shaking that the instrument records. A 7 is not a bit worse than a 6, and it is not seven sevenths of anything. If your child comes away from this book with only one thing, that is the one I would pick, because they will read those numbers in the news for the rest of their life.
Then the map. Earthquakes are not scattered randomly. They run in lines, along the seams where plates grind past each other, pull apart or shove one under another. Once a child has seen the dots plotted, plate tectonics stops being a claim and starts being an obvious inference from a picture. That is the closest this topic gets to letting a child work something out for themselves.
And last, the thing a good book must say and a bad one fudges: nobody can predict an earthquake. Not next week, not next Thursday. Science can give a region odds over decades, and that is genuinely useful for deciding how to build, but a date is not on offer and anybody who claims one is wrong. Check that the book says so plainly.
Now the complaint, and it is a real one rather than a stylistic gripe.
A comic panel has room for a claim. It does not have room for the working. Every one of the paragraphs above arrives, in this format, as a confident sentence in a speech balloon with a drawing beside it. Faults store strain. The fast wave arrives first. Three stations find the spot. Each step is ten times. All true. None of it shown.
For chemistry that would be a small problem, because a child can go and check a chemistry claim at the sink by dinnertime. Here they cannot check anything. They cannot run the experiment, they cannot see the fault, they cannot derive the wave speeds. What they receive is a set of facts backed by nothing except the authority of a man in sunglasses, and a child who learns that way has learned to trust a source rather than to reason from evidence. That is precisely backwards from what the subject is for.
I am not telling you to skip it. I am telling you that this one comes with homework attached, and the homework is one conversation.
The child it lands with
Picture the seven year old who has moved on from dinosaurs and is now working through disasters. That phase is a good one and a lot of parents apologise for it unnecessarily. Disaster is physics with the drama left in, and this book meets that child exactly where they are standing.
Comics also do a specific job for a child who reads slowly or unwillingly. A page of panels is not intimidating, the pictures carry half the load, and a book that gets finished teaches more than a better book that gets abandoned on page four.
The child I would hold it back from is the anxious one, and I mean that specifically rather than as a general disclaimer. A child who worries about the house at night now has something new to worry about, and unlike a shark or a bear this one is under the floor. See the caution.
And if you have the child who asks how anybody knows, this book will frustrate them, which is not a bad outcome. Their frustration is correct. Hand them the conversation below and they will get more out of that than out of the book.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the two waves, and go outside the next time there is a storm.
Here is the thing to do. When there is lightning, count the seconds between the flash and the thunder. Everybody knows this trick. Almost nobody realises it is the same trick a seismograph does.
Light gets to you effectively at once. Sound crawls. So the gap between the two is not noise, it is a measurement of distance, and the longer you wait for the thunder the further away the strike was. Two signals from one event, travelling at different speeds, and the delay between them tells you how far you are from where it happened.
Now say the sentence out loud: that is exactly what the fast wave and the slow wave do. Same event, two speeds, and the size of the gap is the distance. A seismograph is a machine that counts the seconds between the flash and the thunder, except the flash is a wave through rock and the counting is done in fractions of a second by an instrument that never blinks.
This matters more than it looks. It is the one piece of this entire book that your child can verify with their own senses, on your own porch, at no cost. Everything else in these pages is something they have to take on faith from a comic. This one thing they can hold. And once they have held it, the rest of the book stops being a list of assertions and becomes a set of claims made by people who work the way they just worked.
If a storm is not coming, do it with the far end of a field and somebody banging two boards together, or with fireworks in the summer. The method is the same. The gap is the distance.
What to know going in
There is nothing gruesome on these pages that I would warn you about, and the caution is not about pictures.
The subject is the caution. A child who genuinely takes in that the ground is not fixed can carry that around for a fortnight, and it lands differently depending on where you live. If earthquakes are theoretical where you are, this reads as an adventure. If they are not, and where I live they are not, your child is going to ask a question this book has no answer for, which is whether it will happen to us. Know that the question is coming and decide what you want to say before it arrives rather than at bedtime.
The other thing to be straight about is what the book is not. It explains what an earthquake is. It does not tell a family what to do during one. Do not hand it over as though it covers that, because a child can finish a book like this feeling informed and be no safer at all. If preparedness is the reason you are buying, this is not the purchase.
Last, the band. The store tags it 4 to 8, and that range is wide for a reason. A comic looks easy and this one carries vocabulary that a fourth grader will need read to them. An eighth grader will finish it in fifteen minutes and want more, which is a fair use of $8.99 but is worth knowing.
Where to get it
Here is how I would actually use it, and it is not as a read-once. Buy it as a reference and leave it on the shelf, spine out, where a child can reach it.
The Earth-Shaking Facts about Earthquakes with Max Axiom, Super Scientist is $8.99, and it earns that back on the morning your child hears a number on the radio and comes to ask what a 6.8 means. Earthquakes turn up in the news three or four times a year. Fifteen minutes of comic panels at exactly the moment the question is live beats an hour of anything at a time when nobody was asking.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Understanding Global Warming: What the Book Says
Understanding Global Warming with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Agnieszka Biskup
Grade 4 to 8
Volcanoes with Max Axiom: Buy It for the Cutaway
The Explosive World of Volcanoes with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Christopher L Harbo
Grade 4 to 8
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
The Tornado Scientist: The Day That Ends in Nothing
The Tornado Scientist: Seeing Inside Severe Storms by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
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.
