As the title suggests, Bernard Most tackles the question that most, if not all, students wonder when they begin to study the world of dinosaurs: How big were the dinosaurs? Most answers this question, dinosaur by dinosaur, by comparing each of twenty different kinds of dinosaurs to things from our modern world with which students are more readily familiar.

Do Whales Have Belly Buttons? Questions and Answers about Whales and Dolphins by Melvin and Gilda Berger
Scholastic, ISBN: 0439085713

Do whales have bad breath?  (Yes, it smells fishy!) Why do dolphins whistle?  (It helps them keep in touch!) Do whales have teeth? (Many of them do!)  These are just some of the more than seventy-five questions and answers from Scholastic’s “Q & A” series that will amuse your students.

The Top of the World: Climbing Mount Everest by Steve Jenkins
Houghton Mifflin, ISBN: 0618196765

Climbing Mount Everest is an activity that most students will likely never experience, yet Steve Jenkins’s The Top of the World: Climbing Mount Everest gives readers the opportunity to learn what it might be like to scale the world’s tallest and most dangerous mountain.

Remembering Mrs. Rossi by Amy Hest
Candlewick Press (forthcoming February 2007)
ISBN: 0763621633 (Hardcover)

The coming-of-age book, Remembering Mrs. Rossi, is the fictional story of Annie, her schoolteacher mother, and her professor father (a creative-writing teacher). We learn about the apartment in which they live and the summers they spend at the beach. However, 8-year-old Annie experiences a life-changing event when her mother unexpectedly passes away.

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
Random House, ISBN: 0375822747

Jeanne DuPrau’s first novel, The City of Ember, depicts life in an underground city—post-apocalypse. Ember, encompassed by total darkness, is lit exclusively by electric lights: floodlights in the streets, in greenhouses, lamps in shops and homes. The short first chapter, a prologue really, introduces readers to the builders of the city and their concerns for the future of those who will live in the city of Ember.