The cover of this book makes a claim it cannot keep, and that turns out to be the best thing about it.
The format first, said once so I never have to say it again. One animal to a spread, one true fact, and a Howard McWilliam cartoon of a kid using it. Sandra Markle writes them and a good many on our shelf are built to exactly that pattern.
This is the odd sibling. It opens a spin-off, so instead of a body part your child gets an ability, and instead of a mixed menagerie every animal in it lives in the ocean. Same two creators, bigger format, $5.99, K to 3.
The science it actually teaches
The coconut crab first, because that is the claim I mean.
The cover says a coconut crab could slice through sheets of metal. It could not. What a coconut crab has is a crushing grip, among the strongest measured in any animal, and what it does with that grip is break open coconuts. Crushing is not slicing. The true version is more impressive than the sales version, and a six year old who spots the difference has learned something the book never set out to teach.
The octopus page is where the real science is. A giant Pacific octopus can pour itself through a gap barely wider than a coin, and the reason is not stretching and not magic. It has no skeleton. The only hard part of an octopus is its beak, so whatever hole the beak fits through, the rest of the animal can follow. One sentence, and it explains the whole trick.
The smell is real and the distance is oversold. A great white does give a large share of its brain to smell, and it picks up very small amounts of chemical in water. What it does not do is smell across open ocean the way you smell dinner from the next room. Moving water has to carry the scent to the shark first, and then the shark works back up the trail. The current is doing half the job, and leaving the current out is what turns a real ability into a superpower.
Underneath the noise, the format is good at one thing. Every spread attaches a size, a force or a distance to an animal. How small a gap. How hard a grip. How faint a smell. Numbers invite the only question that matters in science, which is how anybody knows. That is why the book sits on our Stealth Science shelf, and it is not because of the sharks.
The child it lands with
Does your child argue with books? Hand them this one. The exaggerations are on the outside and the real facts are inside, and being the person who catches the difference is a better afternoon than being told a stack of facts about fish.
The ocean-obsessed child gets more from this than from the anatomy titles, and for a structural reason rather than a taste one. All the animals share a habitat, so what accumulates in a child's head is a place with things living in it, not a list of unrelated body parts.
On reading level, our tags say K to 3 and that is right. A first grader reads it alone in ten minutes. A four year old will sit through it happily and then ask for the octopus again, and only the octopus, for a week.
One place to stop and talk
The octopus page is the one to slow down on. Before you turn it, put the question to the room: if an octopus can fit through a hole the size of a coin, what part of the octopus decides how small that hole is allowed to be?
Let them guess. Skin, muscle, eyes, all reasonable and all wrong. It is the beak, because the beak is the only part that will not squash. And once your child has that, they own a rule they can carry off this page and onto any animal they meet. What is the hardest part, and where does that part have to go?
What to know going in
The superpower framing is the fun and the problem at once. A book that promises powers will always reach for the biggest version of every fact, and at least one claim on this cover is marketing rather than measurement. Read it flat and let it all stand, and your child comes away with an ocean that is slightly wrong. Read it with a raised eyebrow and it turns into the best book on this shelf for teaching a child to check a claim.
There is also a great white on the cover with its teeth showing. Some four and five year olds do not want that at bedtime, and there is no use pretending the picture is small.
And it is short. This is a browsing book, not a teaching book. It will not carry a unit of work and it was never trying to.
Where to get it
It is $5.99 at What If You Could Sniff Like a Shark?, a dollar more than most of the series because it is the newer spin-off in the larger format.
Now the honest buying advice, because these books sit in a row on the Stealth Science shelf and they really are the same book with the noun swapped. Do not buy the set. Buy one, and buy a second only if the first one gets read to pieces. If your child is ocean-mad, start here. If they are not, start with What If You Had an Animal Home, which is the only one in the set about what animals do rather than what they are wearing.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
What If You Had an Animal Tail? The Best Page Is Last
What If You Had an Animal Tail? by Sandra Markle
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
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.
