Whenever I substitute for a math or music class I run the students through a basic critical thinking question. What are the two universal languages that can be understood anywhere you go? On average one, maybe two students in a class of 28 will respond with music and math. Some might say “science” and while that’s not the desired response, it does illustrate the room’s temperature. Black Lives: Great Minds of Science is a graphic novel highlighting nine scientists from various fields. As a vehicle for information it grabs your attention and speaks to upper-elementary and mglit readers in a way that motivates reluctant ones.
Those reluctant readers, you know, the kids who secretly want to read, but have bought into the group-think, lemming-like fallacy that reading somehow makes you less cool. To those students I would posit this simple question, is it cool to earn more money, or less money? Yeah, money doesn’t make you happy, it’s just a tool, I know that. But if you’re going to fix or build something you need the correct tool and sometimes, if it’s a bigger job, you need more tools or the job becomes infinitely more challenging. Great Minds of Science is created for those reluctant readers.
Wimpy Kid is one of the 500-pound gorillas in children’s literature. It’s one of those book series that young readers feel they should read because their siblings read it, or because they’ve seen one of the dozens of entries in their library. Oliver’s Great Big Universe is cut from the same cloth as Wimpy Kid. Volcanoes Are Hot! is the second entry in this series and has placed STEM fun in the place of Wimpy Kid’s family antics. Yes, STEM-fun is a thing. Fart jokes are a natural crossover to volcanology and students avoiding bullies or hall monitors are essentially recreating Pangea on a localized scale. Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot! has the same degree of laughs as its simian cousin, in addition to the comic-style art and succinct text that keeps young readers locked in.
Locked in, while you can probably infer its definition, means that students focus and concentrate on the thing in front of them. They can be locked in on the study materials, locked in while they’re playing basketball or locked in to the book that they didn’t think that they’d enjoy reading. Upper elementary and middle school students will be locked in when they’re reading Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!.
18 pages into the book we discover that Oliver’s friend, Sven, threw up at lunch because he ate too much cobbler, which he absolutely loves. The art shows a gaggle of students lining up to give him their cobbler, which evolves into an eating competition of sorts with the elementary school cafeteria egging him on with chants of “eat it, eat.” He’s looking sort of purple and is pushed into the puke aspect of the Venn Diagram when a classmate offers him a pickle that supposedly calms the stomach. Just like the volcano that has too much magma and pressure under it, Sven blows chunks and forever stains his formative years.
Thankfully middle school is just around the corner and incidents like that are quickly forgotten by this fickle age group. Alas, it’s not, and Olliver and Sven are forced to do other things to change their peer’s perception and hopefully put that puke into the memory hole. What brought on Olliver’s interest in volcanoes was his aunt, who appears very early in the book as a cavewoman. That’s the way she appears to him, but it’s just his active imagination because she is a volcanologist who has just spent 500 days living in a cave.
Volcanoes Are Hot is the book version of short-attention-span theater. It effortlessly entertains ages eight and up who had previously, and perhaps unconsciously, sworn off reading anything scientific for the sole purpose of entertainment. Some of those kids might have intentionally said that being the ‘smart one’ wasn’t possible or they simply bought into the fallacy that it’s cool not to be intelligent. This is for them, as well as, the kids who realize that it’s the people who don’t play the fool that will reap the rewards.
The joke-to-page ratio is something that we calculate in kidlit books. If there are multiple laughs on one page then the joke-to-page ratio is high and provides numerous reasons for young readers to stay with it. Volcanoes Are Hot! has a high joke-to-page ratio, as well as, incorporating science metaphors, STEM facts, and genuine laughs on every page. The bar for this graphic novel-eque book is high and it launches itself over each increment with aplomb. On some of the pages, the illustrations provide the laughter while others rely on its succinct and age-appropriate text to garner the giggles. When Oliver tries digging a hole to use the bathroom he realizes that it’s more challenging than expected. This causes him to “be pooped, as in tired, not like I pooped in my pants. Although honestly, it could have gone either way.” When you add some great cartoon illustrations next the already funny or ironic text it makes the book like butter to that movie popcorn that was already tasty.
There will be some elementary and middle school readers who would enjoy Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot!, but they’ll presume that because it’s educational that it possibly can’t be entertaining. It’s a pity that some readers will think that, because it’s not. This makes STEM accessible for those who might be scared of it, provides a humor tract for grin-less scientists, proves again the graphic novel-adverse adults that the genre is worth embracing, and gives kids a watercooler book that will up their science grade if they allow it to.
Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot! is by Jorge Cham and is available on Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams Books.
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