Explore with Marco Polo

Gr 2–4—This flawed, poorly designed series introduces the earliest world explorers and their varied destinations. Their stories are told through sound bites of narrative and interspersed frantically with pullouts. Some pages are composed entirely of sidebars. These books may be designed for readers influenced by social media, but they neglect narrative entirely, and kids will struggle to find a central textual thread amid the blasts of information competing for their attention. The series does a disservice to the historical images by including tiny versions, clustered too closely together, and there's often a disconnect between text and images. The authors don't always let readers come to their own conclusions. For example, Ferdinand Magellan is labeled as "pig headed" without any explanatory anecdotes or examples. Give these titles a pass.