ROCKET

Everything young readers need to know about rockets, from liftoff to splashdown.

Inventive die cuts and inherently fascinating subject matter make this board book ideal for budding astronauts. The rocket-shaped cutouts are perfect for small hands to grab onto, and the pages are thick and seemingly indestructible. The colorful drawings are easily read. The images and cutaways are well layered, offering views into the spacecraft’s interior that change with each turn of the page. Rockets are well suited to this approach because of the differently purposed sections, or stages, of the spacecraft. Vocabulary words appear throughout the book, with arrows pointing to what they describe in each illustration. Items depicted include “rocket boosters,” “exhaust gases,” “fuel tank,” and “command module,” to name a few. The astronauts aboard are a man and a woman, both White-presenting, and a similarly spacesuited mouse. After splashdown, they are picked up by a ship with a multiracial crew. Scenes are presented in a sequence of six double-page spreads following the various stages of space exploration and return: “What Is a rocket?” “3, 2, 1, Blast Off!” “Out of This World,” “One Small Step for Man,” “Prepare for Re-entry,” and “Splashdown!” Contemporaneously published companion volume Tractor also features die-cut windows but lacks the level of variation and layering of interest this volume achieves.

Stellar!