Hack Your Kitchen

by Niki Ahrens

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Hack Your Kitchen is a new food science tutorial and recipe guide in the Science Buddies series for young readers. Due out 2nd Feb 2021 from Lerner, it's 32 pages and will be available hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats. All formats have QR code access to extra material including tutorial videos, short articles, and other multimedia content.

This is an engaging and well written guide for young readers (~7-11 years) containing 8 kitchen science experiments illustrating basic materials science and chemistry activities. Each of the tutorials contains safety instructions, tips for adult helpers, tools and supplies, and step by step instructions. The layouts are logical and thought out, with questions for each student to answer themselves. The photography throughout as well as the graphics are clear and colorful. The extra content is well designed and leads to additional questions/answers for further exploration. The book itself is admittedly very short, but the extra online material fleshes the book out fairly well. The book includes a very short glossary and links list for further reading. The choice of human models in the book (while clearly consciously made with editorial considerations in mind) are refreshingly representative and include both boys and girls of a variety of ethnicities. Representation is important at all ages, and I like to see it in STEM books.

This would make a superlative selection for gift giving, home/remote e-schooling science lessons, classroom library, makers' groups, and similar.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes