I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. A very informative book about the North and South Poles. Lots of great information and pictures.

What looked to be a fine book for the school library's natural sciences section didn't come out quite as well as it might. It's a great format – if you hold it one way, you're looking at all things Arctic, but if you flip it over and start afresh from the bottom end you're, well, at the polar opposite. A stretched portrait layout shows off the visual art of the creators, but the text didn't seem up to the same level. We get through one subject (the different northern seals) and then turn to polar bears – but no, we've not finished with the info on the seals. Is this the walrus page? No, polar bears again. Don't get me wrong – it's not as bad as a book I read recently with polar bears at the south pole, and they don't get quite that far here, but it did seem the paragraph-long chunks of information were matching the artworks, and not that the visuals were at the behest of the text.

We don't just cover the wildlife, however, for exploration and lives of the natives are there up north as well, before we end on a downer with the pollution problems. The southern half of the book ends with a more upbeat tale of rising populations of what we nearly killed off by hunting, but it does go to show there is a missed opportunity for the construction of the book. There should have been a greater parallel between the northern pages and the southern, between the arctic subjects and the antarctic ones – you get the (polar) drift. I would have engaged my reader with more filler about why this is important to them, why they should be reading the (perfectly valid and correct) paragraphs here – and certainly would have used an arctic tern to migrate at the centre point of the book, and move us from one to the other. That would not be too childish for the audience this is pitched at, and some semi-narrative context to everything would have helped the young reader get more engaged with these pages. They're not bad, not bad at all – just not doing it quite as well as I would expect.

North Pole / South Pole is a beautiful and informative book that teaches young readers about the animals, environments, and people of our Polar regions.
Many thanks to Quarto Publishing Group and NetGalley for the Advance copy.