The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid by Dylan Thuras and Rosemary Mosco #TheAtlasObscuraExplorer’sGuideForTheWorld’sMostAdventurousKid #NetGalley

 

 

 

 

The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid

by  

Dylan Thuras; Rosemary Mosco

Blurb:

The team behind the #1 bestselling Atlas Obscura presents a kid's illustrated guide to more than 150 of the world's most mesmerizing and mysterious wonders, both natural and manmade, in 47 countries and on every continent on earth. Travel the world through common points of interest, from strange skeletons (Trunyan Tree cemetery in Indonesia leads you to India's Skeleton Lake, for example) to wild waterfalls (while in Peru visit the Gocta Waterfall--and then move on to Antarctica's Blood Falls) to ice caves to bioluminescence.


Unfortunately, this book couldn't totally convince me. On the one hand. there are amazing places in it that not only kids will long to see but most of the illustrations are rather rough, more eye-catchers than real representations of the places and most of them don't invite to browse and linger on the pages.

The descriptions are enticing and make you want to visit those fascinating and intriguing places but  - most of them are simply not doable for kids, not even the most adventurous ones. It's always a question of opportunity and money. Those places are far to exotic, no kid could go there without its parents and not many parents have the money to go there. That wouldn't be a problem if the list of items to take and so on at the beginning wouldn't suggest that this is a book that leads you to places that you can explore. You could do that, sure, but you have no chance to get there.
If there were other illustrations or photos, this could be some bucket list for years to come but ...see above: not with this kind of illustrations and not with this list at the beginning.

Sure, some places are doable but most of them aren't. I think that most kids would prefer to have more places in it that they can actually explore than those (truly amazing, just saying) others that are unreachable.
The journey takes us from Iceland to Venezuela via Antarctica, Japan, Russia, Africa, Australia, China and all over Europe.  I think that it might be rather frustrating as the descriptions make you want to pack and just go there but reality being a beast and such, most of us have to resign ourselves to dreams of going there but - well, back to the illustrations.

 ★★★