North Pole/South Pole:A Flip Book that delivers in content and presentation

Book design is an under-appreciated art. And to be fair, books, especially illustrated books, work just fine the way that the vast majority of them are laid out. It’s only when a book comes along that shatters the established mold that you realize how efficiently, and creatively a book can become. North Pole/South Pole: Pole to Pole: A Flip Book is one of those books. The key to its fun is in the flipbook, phrase. If the book weren’t accompanied with illustrations that are on point and text that’s informative and to the point, then that phrase could also have been a cheesy gimmick.

The result is an engaging illustrated book that utilizes every square inch of every page with its text and illustrations. Moreover, it’s a non-fiction book that loosely tells a story and concisely wraps it all up. The twist that makes the book unique is also head numbingly simple, yet could also be difficult to pair up with the yin to its yang.

Pole To Pole: A Flip Book is presented in a panoramic manner with each page being turned up, instead of left to right. The first half of the illustrated book takes a look at the North Pole. Then, exactly halfway through it, readers turn the book over and around, start from the back cover, and read about the South Pole. The book doesn’t ask readers to turn the book over, nor does it provide them any instructions on how to use it. It treats those middle through upper elementary grade readers with respect and lets them figure it out on their own.

It’s not that the flipbook premise is difficult to figure out. It’s just that one could easily see some book explaining how to use it when it’s utterly not needed.

From the front or back cover, whichever pole you start reading from, the book is attractive and sucks you in. The North Pole on one side and the South Pole on the other are both spelled out using holographic letters that dance as light hits it from different angles. Each one has illustrations of the animals you’ll find there and a graphic that tells you to flip the book over so that you can explore the other pole.

Each side of the book starts out with a map of their respective pole that shows the seas in the area, animals that live there, and names the very few man-made structures the scientists live in whilst there. A table of contents and a very basic ‘What is the Artic?’ or ‘What is the Antarctic?’ allows readers to see the area from a macro perspective.

What will surprise readers, educators and parents is how effortlessly educational and entertaining Pole To Pole is. For example, I had no idea that there’s a volcano in the Antarctic that produces ice chimneys and ice caves, which is in addition to having lakes that have been sealed off from prying eyes for 15 million years.  The fact that there is liquid water in either area boggles my simple mind. It’s the coldest area on the planet, yet there is, and always has been a lake there.

The book is educational and does so via bite-sized nuggets of information that are grouped around characteristics or situations that they have in common. The food chain and the surprisingly diverse creatures that inhabit the area will pique people’s curiosity about this region that most people associate with one that’s void of life or variety.

As an educator, I had no idea that the North and South Pole had so much more to offer than frozen tundra. The illustrations by Nic Jones are realistic, friendly and make readers want to learn more about these areas of the Earth they’ve previously not cared much about. Michael Bright’s text is presented in just the right manner and length so that it teaches readers in a way that’s more like trivia, than education.

North Pole/South Pole: Pole To Pole: A Flip Book is by Michael Bright with illustrations by Nic Jones and available on Words & Pictures an imprint of Quarto Books.

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