Well, I have to give this one 5-Stars if for no other reason than the number of 'oh wows!' that were generated in the back seat.

My children (boy and girl; just turning 8 and 10 this month) just thought this was a fabulous book. And it does have a lot going for it.

For one thing, there are Martin Knowelden's wonderful drawings. They are huge and colorful and fill the pages of this oversized book. For another, there are the fold out pages. My two had a blast folding out the 4 pages that make up the "Life Size" drawing of a Great White's mouth. Don't tell the librarians, but they stood in it's mouth in their socks... and wow! that mouth is BIG.

What this book accomplishes that other books about the great deep don't, is demonstrate and show the real size of critters, or parts of critters. There's a huge shark tooth, for example, which showed me how big some of those teeth get. Plus, there's illustrations of Sea Horses and other animals.

Nice book. Would be a good gift for young animal lovers. The only downside I could find was that the language might be too advanced for small read to read themselves. (NOTE: No Reading Level was available for this book. However, most of Mr. Gilpin's other books were at the 6th grade level)

a mini-review
(booksforkids-reviews.com) ( )

This book has large life-size foldouts and smaller life-size pictures of a lot of different fish (and the occational turtle or invertibrate) and also a few smaller pictures of animals with a hand or diver to show scale. It talks about what life is like in different parts of the ocean, and what different kinds of animals live different places, focusing on the most exciting ones, like sharks. ( )