Katie Coppens

This book is brilliant. It's an excellent and thorough introduction to geology that, on every page, asks and answers the question: What does this have to do with cake? Every concept is explained first, in scientific terms, and then, by analogy to cake. Delicious, delicious cake. The book contains 7 cake recipes that seem fairly easy to follow (note that I have not actually attempted to make any of them, so I don't know how easy they actually are. I will update if/when I try some of them), and Coppens related steps in the process of the recipe to the concepts covered in the chapter they contain. This seems like a delicious, if perhaps not too healthy, way to learn about geology at home. My only nitpick is that there's no index or table of contents to the recipes; but they're all located on right-side pages so it's fairly easy to flip through the short book to find them fast.… (more)

A really fun book for middle-grade readers written as a conversation between the author and a kid with lots of questions. The text is very conversational, with the narrator often interrupting themself to share a wild fact or reassure the reader that really, honestly, a black hole eating up Earth is not something they need to worry about. It's excellently illustrated with beautiful space photos that are -- wonder of wonders -- both captioned in detail and credited properly. If your middle-grade kid has lots of questions about black holes or dark matter or diamond rain or colliding galaxies or what happens if you pee in space (the pee first boils and then freezes into little pee snowflakes), this is the book for you!… (more)