This absolutely stunning book teaches young readers about the magic of nature. There's a lot of information here, so it's a great book to grow with kids and get them excited about the environment and science.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Clavis Publishing for the advance copy.

Well, this was a success. Some might think it sacrilegious to scrawl cartoonish stuff over such wonderful nature photography as we get here, but I think there is no problem when the book is achieving what it set out to do so well. And it does it that well I'm floored with the idea this was from the creators of the woefully inept 'Buildings' book in the same series (ISBN 9781605374994). There we had a photo, a spoilt photo and some asinine questions that would only stump the under-fours, and at least two major mistakes. Here, we're on much safer ground.

Starting with the premise that nature can put on a magic show – bioluminescence, chameleonic changes of colour, invisibility, metamorphosis, walking on our ceilings etc – we see the animals concerned. Each general topic is introduced by a delicious landscape photo, upon which the creator has got his usual childish cartoon animals, but what follows is the science behind it – the life stages of the butterfly and frog, the potentially immortal jellyfish, a whole screed about magic mushrooms, er… Yes, not every decision made in this book is the right one, and it might well rely on a decent science teacher to piece the puzzles together, but it's not alone among books for this age range in just presenting some marvels of nature and leaving them hanging, so I have to give it a strong four stars.

Animals and plants are spectacular creatures that can do "magic". They can turn invisible, they can perform incredible feats of physics, they can illuminate, they can grow very old, they can see much beyond what humans can see, they can hear much better than humans can imagine, they can protect themselves with poison, and they can morph into something new. Such interesting facts about plants and animals presented in an entertaining and education manner.