A nonfiction graphic novel about sharks, drawn as a comic and built as a science book. It works through the animals a child already has a name for, the great white, the hammerhead, the nurse shark and the extinct megalodon, and it spends most of its pages on how the animal is put together and how it hunts rather than on how frightening it is. Joe Flood is the name on the cover. It is a paperback, it sits in the Science Comics series, and our store bands it at grades 4 to 8.
The science it actually teaches
This is the reason it sits on our Stealth Science shelf. Plenty of shark books for this age tell a child that sharks are old, large and misunderstood, and then stop. This one keeps going into how the animal is built, which is where the actual biology lives.
Start with the skeleton, because a shark does not have one made of bone. It is cartilage, the same stuff in the end of your own nose. It is lighter than bone and it bends, and that is a large part of why a shark can turn inside its own body length when a fish with a bony frame cannot.
Then the skin. A shark is covered in small tooth shaped scales rather than the flat overlapping plates on a salmon. They point backward, they cut drag, and structurally they are closer to teeth than to anything you would call a scale. Then the teeth themselves, which sit in rows and travel forward. A shark that loses a tooth is not injured, it is resupplied.
Then the senses, and this is the part worth paying for. A shark can find a fish that is buried in sand and holding perfectly still, because a working muscle leaks a faint electric field and the shark carries jelly filled pores in its snout that pick that field up. That is not a superpower and it is not a guess. It is an organ, it has a name, and a child can be taught what it does in about four minutes. Once your child has that, the hammerhead stops being a funny shape and turns into an answer to a question. Spread the head wide and you sweep that electric sense across more water at once.
The book also sets the animals against each other instead of listing them. A great white has to keep swimming to move water over its gills. A nurse shark can pump water across its own gills and lie still on the bottom, which is exactly why it is the one a person in scuba gear may rest a hand on. That single contrast teaches more about how a body works than a page of adjectives about how big a great white gets.
There is ecology underneath it. Sharks sit at the top, and pulling the top out of a food web changes everything below it. A child who finishes this book can tell you what shark skin is made of and how a shark finds food it cannot see. Most adults cannot do that.
The child it lands with
The shark kid. You already know whether you have one.
It also lands with the child who will read a comic and will not read six pages of unbroken text. This is a real book with real vocabulary in it, and the panels carry weight that a wall of paragraphs cannot.
And it lands with the child who is frightened of deep water and watches the shark shows anyway. That child is not asking to be reassured. They are asking for information, and information is what actually settles that particular fear.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at megalodon and ask your child how anybody knows how big it was.
Almost nothing of the animal is left. Cartilage does not fossilize the way bone does, so megalodon is known mostly from teeth and a small number of vertebrae, and every length you have ever heard quoted is an estimate scaled up from a tooth. Those numbers have moved over the years as people argued about the method. That is the difference between a measurement and an estimate, and a child who has it reads science headlines differently for good.
What to know going in
It is a book about a predator and it is drawn. Hunting happens on the page, in pictures. There is blood in the water and there are teeth at close range, and a picture lands in a child faster than a sentence does. A sensitive seven or eight year old reading up into this band should have you sitting next to them the first time through.
The argument of the book is that our fear of sharks is out of proportion to the danger, and to make that argument it has to raise the attacks. If your child is already scared of open water, expect the fear to get louder before it gets quieter. That is not a reason to skip the book. It is a reason to read it together rather than hand it over.
The conservation material is grim. People kill sharks in enormous numbers, for their fins and by accident in nets, and a book that likes sharks does not draw that gently. A child who takes animal suffering hard will take this hard.
The book teaches deep time and evolution as settled fact and does not hedge it, because that is what the science says. We say so plainly so that nobody meets it by surprise.
Last, the format lies about the difficulty. A comic looks like an easy read and this one is not especially easy. The store bands it 4 to 8. Treat the bottom of that band as a read together book rather than an independent one, and do not assume the top of the band has outgrown it, because a comic is often the only shape in which a thirteen year old will accept nonfiction.
Where to get it
Each Science Comics volume stands on its own, so there is no reading order to keep track of and no earlier book to buy first. If sharks are what your child is already asking about, this is the one: Science Comics: Sharks: Nature's Perfect Hunter, $13.99 in paperback. If deep water frightens her, get it from the library first and sit beside her through the hunting pages before you decide to own it.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Coral Reefs: The Comic That Teaches Real Biology
Science Comics: Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean by Maris Wicks
Grade 4 to 8
Science Comics Dogs: A Genetics Book in Disguise
Science Comics: Dogs: From Predator to Protector by Andy Hirsch
Grade 4 to 8
The Octopus Scientists: A Mind on Another Branch
The Octopus Scientists by Sy Montgomery
Grade 5 to 8
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist 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.
