The under in this one is not underground.
Every other book in this series puts its second world somewhere you would have to dig or dive to reach. Here the hidden world is at the bottom of a desert slot canyon, in the shade, and you can walk into it. A family hikes down. Over the rim the sun is baking mud into stone. Under the cliffs there are bighorn sheep working the rock, roadrunners nesting in cacti, and banded geckos tucked into sand.
Kate Messner wrote it. It is $9.99 and it is the newest of the five.
The science it actually teaches
Deserts get taught to young children as absence. Hot, dry, empty, sand. This book teaches them as management, which is what a desert actually is.
Start with shade. On a summer day in canyon country the gap between a sunlit rock and a shaded one is larger than the gap between two seasons where most people live. That is not scenery. It is the resource every animal in this book spends its day working. A banded gecko goes into sand. A roadrunner puts a nest inside a cactus, which handles heat and handles anything that would like to eat the eggs, both at once. Bighorn sheep take the rock, and rock holds shade in a way flat open ground cannot.
Then the walls. Baked mud turned to stone, laid down in layers, and a slot canyon is a cut straight through those layers. A child looking at a canyon wall is looking at a stack of time.
Then the water, which is the part that surprises people. Slot canyons are carved by water in a landscape that mostly has none, and the wildflower bloom in this book is the same fact from the other end. The desert is not waterless. It is water on an irregular schedule, and the rock and the plants and the animals are all built around the irregularity.
The child it lands with
A child who has decided deserts are boring is the best possible reader for this one.
Second best is a child with a trip coming. If Utah, Arizona or New Mexico is on the calendar this year, read it in the car.
The store bands it K to 3 and that band holds. The sentences are short and the hard words are animal names, which is the good kind of hard.
One place to stop and talk
Find the first spread that puts sunlight and shadow in the same picture. One question: why is anything alive on the shaded side and almost nothing on the lit side?
That is the whole book, and a five year old can get there without help.
What to know going in
Two things, and the second one matters more than anything else on this page.
The small one first. This is the newest book in the series and the least broken in. It is not the one your library already has, and if somebody recommended you a Kate Messner nature book without saying which, the book they meant is almost certainly Over and Under the Snow.
Now the real one. A child who loves this book will want to go into a slot canyon. Slot canyons flood. They flood fast, and they flood from rain falling miles upstream in weather you cannot see or hear from down inside the walls, which is the part that catches people out. This book is a hike on a beautiful day and it carries none of that, because it is not a safety book and should not be. If your family is the kind that acts on a book, that conversation belongs to you, and it belongs at the kitchen table before anyone books anything, not at the trailhead.
There is ordinary desert predation in it as well. Something eats something. It is handled the way a field guide handles it, without drama, and most children at this age take it in stride.
Where to get it
$9.99 at Over and Under the Canyon, the same money as the snow book and half what the pond and rainforest volumes cost. It is filed with its four siblings on Stealth Science.
Buy it second. Not first, and not last. Read Over and Under the Snow, then read this one within a week of it, because the two teach one idea in opposite climates: there is a layer you are not looking at, and it has rules. A child who meets that idea twice, once at forty below and once at a hundred above, keeps it. That is the best argument for this book and it is not an argument about deserts at all.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Over and Under the Pond: Why You Cannot See In
Over and Under the Pond: (Environment and Ecology Books for Kids, Nature Books, Children's Oceanography Books, by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Over and Under the Rainforest: It Is Central America
Over and Under the Rainforest by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
One Tiny Turtle: The Thirty Years Nobody Sees
One Tiny Turtle: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
Surprising Sharks: What the Word Shark Actually Covers
Surprising Sharks: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
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.
