11/1/07 School Library Journal
Featuring a new author and a colorful redesign, these volumes expertly update Larry Dane Brimner's 1998 editions, and also add a title that looks past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the search for extrasolar planets. Each one matches a clearly reasoned, matter-of-fact text to plenty of small but sharply reproduced color photos and pages of new or restated facts, and rounded off with multimedia lists of audience-appropriate further resources. Despite minor bobbles (for instance, Landau assigns the space probe New Horizons different speeds in Pluto and Beyond Pluto), these remain the gold standard for post-picture-book nonfiction, and should be first purchases for any library that serves fledgling readers.