Ask a five year old to draw a shark. You will get a gray torpedo with an open mouth, coming at the viewer, and you will get it every time. Nicola Davies wrote this book to take that drawing apart. It is a picture book, our store bands it K to 3, and its argument is that the word shark is being asked to do a job it cannot do.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it sits on our Stealth Science shelf, and the science is not the part you would guess. It is not anatomy. It is classification, which sounds like the dullest thing in biology and is not, because your child is already doing it and doing it wrong.
Shark is a group name. It works the way bird works. Nobody thinks a penguin and a hummingbird are the same animal in different colors, and that is exactly the mistake every child makes with sharks, because the group has one famous member and the famous one has eaten the name. Hundreds of species carry it. The drawing your child made is one of them.
Once the group opens up, the range inside it does the teaching on its own. There are sharks that are fully grown and small enough to hold in two hands. There is the whale shark at the other end, the largest fish alive, big enough that a person swimming alongside it looks like a hitchhiker. Same group. Same word. If one noun has to stretch from a hand to a bus, it is not describing an animal. It is describing a family, and a five year old can feel that gap without being told what it means.
Then the inversion, which is the best idea in the book. The largest sharks in the ocean feed on some of the smallest food in it. They cruise with their mouths open and strain tiny drifting animals out of the water, and they have no interest at all in anything the size of a person. Size and danger come apart right there. A child who has spent five years assuming that bigger means worse gets that assumption pulled out from under her by a real animal, which is a better way to learn it than being told.
Body shape follows the job as well. Some sharks are flat rather than torpedo shaped and spend their lives lying on the bottom under a layer of sand, waiting for something to walk past. That animal does not look like the drawing, does not move like the drawing and does not hunt like the drawing, and it is still a shark.
The book lands the proportion at the end, and it does it without lying. It does not claim sharks are harmless. Some are dangerous and the book says so. What it says is that only a small number of the hundreds of kinds have ever harmed a person, and that people kill sharks in numbers no shark population can answer. That is the correction, and it is arithmetic rather than reassurance, which is exactly why it works on a child who has already decided to be afraid.
A child who finishes this book answers the question what is a shark with the question which one. That is the whole move. It is a real scientific habit, arriving at five years old inside a book about a frightening fish.
The child it lands with
The frightened one. That is the main audience and there is no point pretending otherwise. The child who will not put her face in the pool. The child who asks whether there are sharks in the lake. The child who saw something on a screen at somebody else's house and has not been right since.
There is a second child and it is nearly the opposite one. The shark kid who has been fed nothing but great whites and megalodon and has quietly started to find that boring. This is the book that shows him the group is much bigger than the poster, and that is usually where the real interest starts.
A third: the four or five year old in a house where somebody older is reading nonfiction. The big text carries the story aloud while an older sibling works through the small print at her own level, and both of them come away with something.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the smallest shark in the book and ask what would happen if you put it in the bathtub. Then turn to the biggest one and ask what that one would need. Same word on both pages. Your child has just made the argument of the entire book without anyone explaining it to her, which is the only way that argument ever sticks.
What to know going in
The fear gets louder before it gets quieter. To shrink the danger the book has to raise it, so attacks come up, teeth are drawn, and a child who is already frightened of water will fasten onto those pages first. Read it with her the first time. Do not hand it over and leave the room.
The ending is the harder half for a small child, and it is not the part parents expect. The book turns and says that people kill sharks in enormous numbers. A five year old who has just been told to stop being afraid of the animal is then told the animal needs protecting from us. Some children take that heavily and quietly. Be ready for the question at bedtime.
The reading level is uneven on purpose, and that is the one thing about the format worth saying here. There are two sizes of text on most pages, they are pitched at different ages, and the small one runs harder than the store band suggests. A parent reading aloud can get ambushed halfway down a page.
Last, it is not a reference book. There is no depth on any single species, almost no anatomy, and nothing here that will answer a homework question. It fixes one wrong idea very well and then stops.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 in paperback at Surprising Sharks, and it is the right first shark book rather than the right only one. If your child is under about eight, buy this and stop here. If she is already past it and asking how a shark finds a fish it cannot see, the Science Comics shark volume on the Stealth Science shelf is the next rung, and it is a longer, bloodier, far more anatomical book. Buying those two in the wrong order is the common mistake. Correct the idea first. Go into the body second.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
One Tiny Turtle: The Thirty Years Nobody Sees
One Tiny Turtle: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
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
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
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.
