Published by Big Picture Press, 2016.

Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean is another large format pictorial compendium from the masters of children’s non-fiction, Big Picture Press. It’s packed full of astonishing facts and figures and, as it explains in the introduction, it’s a book of superlatives: the longest living animals, the world’s biggest storms, the tallest trees… Inside its pages there’s a wealth of information about the world that we live in.

The information is presented across double pages and uses illustrations to make visual comparisons. Page Tsou’s illustrations, which have a lithograph aesthetic, are incredibly detailed and have a retro feel to them, as do some of the fonts used for the headings. My only reservation about the illustrations is that I find the colours a little too muted.

This is a book that will delight children who have a thirst for knowledge. I was amazed to learn that a bowhead whale has lived for 211 years and that there are almost as many brown rats on Earth as there are humans. I was alarmed to discover that the lion’s mane jellyfish is 37 metres long and that the atlas moth has a wingspan of 25cm!

Highest Mountain, Deepest Ocean is a book which children will return to again and again, forever on a quest for the most mind-blowing fact.

Rating: 💙💙💙💙

Suitable for children aged 8+

Thank you to Big Picture Press for sending me this book to review.