World of Wonder Mountains is rocky edu-tainment for ages 5 through 9

“It’s like a poetry book about animals, mountains and the things that live in the mountains”, our 10-year-old said when he read World of Wonder Mountains. Well, to an extent he is correct in that upper-elementary school overview. The first page he turned to was one of the more poetic pages. It’s about the snow lion and spotlights her massive paws as they maw the snowy crags in some of the impossibly high mountains. It could be viewed as poetry. You could also see it as a snippet into what happens in that spot, at that particular moment to that certain animal.

World of Wonder Mountains is a beautifully illustrated book that manages to work as an early reader book on nature, animals, geography, and poetry for some readers. After our oldest son described the book like that I looked at it again and found something different.

I found a book with fabulous landscape paintings that were also peppered with bits and pieces of some of the world’s most famous mountains or mountain ranges. The Rocky Mountains, the Andes, Himalayas, Alps, Rainbow Mountains, Mount Fuji, and a couple of other peaks are shown and described in it.

Each area is shown in its own area, which allows readers to distinguish some of the subtle differences between these rocky landforms. My son read the written descriptions as poetry, whereas I took more of the soft, narrative approach. We peer into a snapshot of life in the Andes with a pack of vizcachas. At first glance, they look like a rabbit with their potentially bushy tail but look closer and you’ll see a member of the rodent family. These critters live high up in the mountains and do what rats do, but with much bigger ears to detect things that might make a meal out of them. If you go a little higher in those same mountains you’ll see the Andean Condor, one of the world’s largest flying birds.

Between the lush pictures that illustrator Chris Madden has created and the short stories that Charlotte Guillain has written, you won’t be sure which force is keeping you attracted to the book. It’s a coffee table book for young readers, but the vocabulary is probably too deep for them to read and those ages don’t have a coffee table.

It’s the ‘world of wonder’ tagline that really sticks with this book. You intend to read just a page or two, but find yourself thumbing through various mountain ranges. It’s stealth learning that’s done through approachable text and art that nails down the environment. The book will be great for kids who are between kindergarten and second grade but will demo older for those kids who are doing a report on environmental studies and need inspiration or pull facts.

World of Wonder Mountains is by Charlotte Guillain and Chris Madden and is published by Quarto Knows.

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