Review Detail

How to Be a Detective and Other Crime-Fighting Jobs

Kids Nonfiction 75

What do you want to be when you grow up?

September 02, 2024

Overall rating

5.0

Writing Style

5.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

Learning Value

5.0

This How To Be series from Nosy Crow (which also includes How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs, as well as the upcoming How to Be a Doctor and Other Life-Saving Jobs) has a lot of great information for elementary and middle grade students who want to start investigating career options. Starting with what a detective does, and the equipment that they might use, the book continues to give more necessary details about why this is an important job, how to become a detective, and descriptions of skills that are useful to the job. There's information about how crimes are reported, investigated, and processed, as well as a section on what happens when a person goes to court. There are lots of other related jobs listed, such as SWAT team members, private investigators, Secret Service agents, and more specialized jobs such as those related to vehicles, research, and even animals. For a short time, my daughter thought about being a forensic accountant, so I actually did know about that career path!

Good Points

All of the information is well illustrated by Linero's bright, infographic style drawings, and the text is well arranged on the pages. There is a lot of information, but it's broken up into shorter segments that older elementary school students won't find too challenging.

I love that there are some tips for young readers who are interested in detective work, and suggestions that they start paying closer attention to things that happen around them. There is also a list of organizations to explore.

I particularly enjoyed the history timeline, which included Kate Warne of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who became the world's first woman detective in 1856. That, combined with the fact that the first detective novel was by the US author Edgar Allen Poe, really made me wonder why the British have so many more detective shows and books than the US does. The author, Detective Beever, is a police detective in the UK.

This is a bit more advanced than Hische's Who Will U Be, but more focused on a single type of career than MacIsaac and Nelson's See It, Dream It, Do It. So many of my students want to be video game designers or social media influencers that I would love to see a new series like the 1950s Carla Greene Children's Press "I Want to Be a..." books, but with jobs like coders, engineers, and, well, still teachers!