Extreme STEM in the Mountains is a well illustrated STEM nonfiction book for young readers (Lexile 550L, ~7-9 years) and part of the Extreme Stem series by Noah Leatherland. Released 1st Aug 2025 by Mackin on their North Star Editions imprint, it's 24 pages and is available in hardcover (library binding) and paperback formats.

STEM education is vital across the board for everyone, and there's a serious dearth of good engaging selections which meet kids where they are, engage their interests, and inform/educate. This book is not super technical, it's not difficult, but it does manage to make technology and engineering in mountainous terrain interesting in the context of sports which use equipment/technology/physics to perform safely. It's a very short book, light on text, fully illustrated and photographed throughout in color. The author/publisher have included a short glossary and abbreviated index.

Anyhow. STEM book for kids, and it's an interesting one for the target audience. It would be a good choice for public or school library acquisition, home use, or gift giving.

Three and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

With the forces of gravity and friction involved in a lot of things mountainous, such as snowboarding or rappelling down them, this seems a very sensible early look at how STEM subjects come to be used in the outer world. But this never convinced me the four booklets in this series were better as four and not one proper book – by being so pictorial and so slight on the word count it comes across as very thin.

A perfect introduction to what STEM looks like in the real world. An ideal addition to a school library for early readers.
#ExtremeSTEMintheMountains #NetGalley

This adventurous book teaches readers all about the various experiences they can have in the mountains and how match, engineering, science, and even technology can work together to generate an extreme outdoors experience. I love visiting Salt Lake City any chance I get and found this book to be very enjoyable, especially for reluctant readers or reluctant STEM participants.

I highly recommend this for schools and libraries.

This is a very interesting and STEM-heavy book for young readers! To start this review, I want to mention my one small critique. I could see where the author was trying to explain how STEM is used in the mountains in various ways, but I felt like there wasn't enough depth. I thought that the author put a lot of focus on the T and E in STEM but gave little to no attention to the M and S.
However, that is the only critique that I have for this book! As I mentioned, I thought that the topics that the author covered were interesting and unique, and I think that this book brings something new and fresh to the world of children's books. Lastly, the explanations were written really well for the target audience, and I don't think that readers will be confused or left with remaining questions when they read this book, so bravo for that!

This is such a great book for kids to learn about physics without knowing they're learning about physics. There are photos of adventures in the mountains, such as snowboarding, with explanations of how physics makes everything possible. I remember struggling to explain some of these concepts to very young people, but this kind of book makes learning painless.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this ARC