This or That Survival Debate: A Rip-Roaring Game of Either/Or Questions by Erik Heinrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The old playground game of choosing between two bad outcomes gets a thorough treatment in thirteen pairs of nasty choices. Four stars because I 'really' liked it! I could imagine myself in 4th or 5th grade talking about this kind of thing for hours with my friends. Each short text snippet gave me just enough pros and cons to make both options horrible. This would spur the discussion! I found myself thinking seriously about trying to get away from piranhas, or weighing the probability of poisonous snakes on a deserted island. The stock photos and simple graphic backgrounds present just enough of each situation to create the desired shock value. Fully corresponding relationship between the photos and the text, but with nothing in the photos to carry any of the narrative burden--so a weak corresponding relationship instead of a strong one.
It's hard to call this really an 'informational' book. Children's literature suffers from rigid genre titles this way. But it's definitely the kind of book that would get high circulation in a school library. It has information in it, but the information isn't the central point. It's the discussion, the social aspect of information as something to talk about. Ultimately it's the either/or structure that is the point of this book, and the cover gives this clearly in its subtitle: A rip-roaring game of either/or questions. It's a game book!
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