Cosmic Collisions: Asteroid vs. Comet

Cosmic Collisions: Asteroid Vs. Comet presented introductory information about Comets and Asteroids through a mock collision scenario. The wrestling match presenter tone of the text made it an engaging nonfiction read for Middle-Grade readers. This book has great illustrations that make the information easy to visualize. The text did a back-and-forth presentation of facts between an asteroid and a comet that got to be a bit confusing if you do not have a good grasp on the differences between the two. I think for beginning learners’ information about this topic it would have been easier to understand if it had been presented with one and then the other before they had their mock collision. Overall, the tone was engaging and made for page-turning excitement to see which would win in a collision. It had good information about both astral events and was geared toward the target audience.

Can we live on Mars? Is Pluto a planet? Star Wars vs. Star Trek? There's no shortage of geeky, space related questions that tweens readers can ponder, and Asteroid vs. Comet offers new opportunities for scientific thinking. In order to really calculate things properly, we first meet both an asteroid, in the Asteroid Belt, and a comet, in the Oort Cloud. We find out that while asteroids are hot, comets are cold, and learn the speeds, weights, and composition of the competing bodies. The two rarely collide, but this is a fun speculation.

This is not quite a comic book (although it is a comet book!), but a nicely sized nonfiction book with lots of illustrations. Each topic is approached with a page from both the asteroid and the comet point of view, and the text is very readable. Words and ideas are nicely explained, and I was able to understand the scientific concepts. There is definitely an air of suspense in this, which is hard to create in a science related nonfiction book, and I won't ruing the ending and tell you who survived the hypothetical collision!