Rub a balloon on a jumper and it will lift a scrap of paper off the table.
That is the same physics as the current running your refrigerator. Same stuff, same rules, one of them sitting still and one of them moving. Hardly any child is ever told that, which is why electricity ends up filed in a child's head as two unrelated mysteries: a party trick, and a dangerous thing in the wall.
Liam O'Donnell wrote this one for the Graphic Science line. It is a comic, the panels carry the teaching, and the move that makes it worth owning is that it goes small. Max Axiom takes a child inside the wire, to the level of what is actually moving, which is a place no photograph and no field trip can go.
We also carry The Magic School Bus and the Electric Field Trip, and it is worth saying straight out how the two differ, because on paper they look like the same book twice. The field trip is the system: where the power is made, how it crosses the country on the poles, and what the toaster does with it when it arrives. It is a picture book for a younger child and it works outward from the house. This one works inward from the wire and it is written for grades 4 to 8. If you already own the field trip, this is not a repeat. It is the layer underneath it.
The science it actually teaches
Start with charge, because everything in the book is a version of it.
There is something in matter that comes in two kinds, the two kinds pull towards each other and shove away from their own, and one of them can be persuaded to move. That is it. That is the entire subject. Rubbing a balloon scrapes some of the movable kind off your jumper onto the balloon, the balloon now has a surplus, and the surplus reaches out and grabs paper. Nothing has been created. Something has been relocated.
Static and current are that same something in two states. Charge that has been moved somewhere and is stuck there is static, and it discharges all at once when it finally gets a path, which is the crack you feel on a car door and the same event as lightning at an absurd scale. Charge that has a path and keeps going is current. A child who gets that one sentence has just connected the balloon to the refrigerator, and that connection is the single most valuable thing in the book.
Then conductors and insulators, which the book treats properly as a property of the material rather than a rule somebody wrote down. Metals hold their movable charge loosely and hand it along. Rubber, glass and dry wood hold theirs tight. This is why a wire is metal and why the sleeve around it is not, and the moment a child sees that the plastic on a cord is doing a job rather than being a colour, a lot of the world reorganises itself.
Then the circuit, and the book is right to insist on both halves of it. You need a complete path, and you need something pushing. Take either one away and nothing happens, and most children only ever get told about the first.
The publisher's own description says the book also covers how electricity is produced and how it is distributed. That ground is real and it is the same ground the field trip book walks, so if you own both, treat this one's generation pages as revision and spend your attention on the charge pages, which are the part only this book has.
Now the honest limit, and on this subject it is sharper than on any other book in the line. Voltage, current and resistance are not three facts. They are a relationship, and a relationship is only ever learned by turning the handle on it a few times with actual numbers. A comic panel can print all three words and a clear caption for each. It cannot make your child work an example, and it cannot make them predict what happens to one when you change another. So be clear-eyed about the trade: your child will come out of this able to say what voltage is and unable to use it. For grades four and five that is the right amount. For a seventh or eighth grader this is the opening chapter of the topic and not the topic, and you will need something with problems in it afterwards.
The child it lands with
The one who has already taken something apart. If there is a torch in pieces on a windowsill in your house, or a radio somebody opened and could not close, that child has been asking this question with their hands for a while and getting no answer back.
The one who asks what it actually is. Some children are satisfied by knowing what electricity does. A few are not, and they can tell that every adult around them is describing the effects and dodging the thing, and they find that maddening. This book does not dodge it.
And the one who will not read a science textbook but will read a comic on the floor for an hour. That is the whole reason this line exists, and the store's own tag says it plainly: high interest, low vocabulary.
One place to stop and talk
Do not do this one on the page. Do it on the table, and buy the parts before the book arrives.
You need a D cell battery, a small bulb in a holder, and two lengths of wire. That is a dollar or two at a hardware store and it is worth more than the book on its own. When your child reaches the circuit pages, stop reading and build it, and let them get it wrong first.
Then, once it lights, take one wire off. Ask why the bulb went out when the battery is still just as full as it was ten seconds ago. Stay there until they say the path, not the power, because that is the idea and most children arrive at it out loud in about a minute.
Then bridge the gap with things. A paperclip. A pencil lead. A rubber band. A coin, a leaf, a piece of paper. Let your child sort your kitchen into things that carry and things that do not, and do not tell them the answers, because the whole point is that they can now find out for themselves in four seconds per object. That afternoon is the difference between a child who read about conductors and a child who knows which of their own possessions are one.
What to know going in
The book itself is not frightening and there is nothing upsetting in it. The title is a pun and the tone is cheerful throughout. The caution here is about the day after.
A child who finishes this book wants to try something, and that is exactly what you want and exactly what needs a boundary drawn round it first. Draw it before they finish reading, not after. The rule is simple enough for a nine year old to hold: anything you can pick up in your hand and carry is fine, and anything that plugs into the wall is completely off limits, including when it is unplugged.
That last clause is the one adults skip and it is the one that matters. Devices that plug in hold a charge inside them after they are unplugged, sometimes for a long time, and a curious child taking apart an old charger or a television is in real danger while believing they have made it safe. The other one worth naming out loud is that a battery is not automatically harmless because it is small. Running a wire, a paperclip or a strip of foil straight from one end of a battery to the other, with no bulb in the way, gets hot fast, and a lithium battery or a car battery treated that way is genuinely dangerous. Say both of those once, calmly, and then let your child build every safe thing they can think of.
The second item is the format ceiling described above. If you are buying this for an older child and expecting it to carry a physics unit, it will not, and it was never trying to.
Third, the reading band. Grades 4 to 8 describes the vocabulary rather than the depth, and the same book is a stretch read at the bottom of that range and a quick refresher at the top.
Where to get it
$8.99 at The Shocking World of Electricity with Max Axiom, Super Scientist.
My honest advice is do not buy this book on its own. Buy it with two dollars of hardware, because a book about circuits with no circuit in the room is half a lesson and the same book with a battery, a bulb and two wires on the table is a whole one. If your house already has The Magic School Bus and the Electric Field Trip, this is still worth the money, because that one shows the system and this one shows the charge, and a child who has both has a subject rather than a topic. The rest of the Stealth Science shelf carries the other Max Axiom titles, and the energy one is the natural next step, since electricity is one form of energy and that book is where the word gets defined.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Understanding Photosynthesis: The One That Fits the Format
Understanding Photosynthesis with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Liam O'Donnell
Grade 4 to 8
Adventures in Sound: Physics You Can Hear at Home
Adventures in Sound with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Emily Sohn
Grade 4 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.
