Mollusks is one of a series of short books for primary school learners, this volume written by Kaitlyn Salvatore. Released 25th Jan 2025 by Rosen Publishing under the Britannica educational group, it's 32 pages and is available in hardcover library binding format.

This is a colorful and engaging book about the mollusk phylum and *some* of the classes belonging to it: bivalves, gastropods, and cephalopods. For some reason (brevity? complexity?) the other 4 classes: aplacophs, monoplacophs, polyplacophs, and scaphopods aren't included in this book. The target audience is roughly 6-10 years old, though it's quite information dense, and there aren't likely a lot of kids that age with good enough reading skills to really absorb the info (in other words, there are a lot of adults who could learn a thing or two from the content included here).

The language is not complex, but the text is written in scientifically accurate jargon. Scattered throughout are prompts and questions to help readers think about the material. The prompts are in color highlighted text bars labeled "Consider This".

The book is very colorful and fully illustrated throughout. Most of the book uses stock photography, but the quality and sharpness of the photos are top notch.

Four stars. It would make an excellent choice for public, school, or classroom library acquisition, for home use, or for gift giving (to a biology/natural sciences interested kid).

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Mollusks was a very interesting and informative book and I learned several new facts about these creatures! This book has captivating pictures showing various mollusks. This is sure to capture the reader’s attention. This is a very nice, educational read for 6-10 year old readers. I give this book 4 stars. I would have given it 5 stars but I did not like the environmental language toward the back of the book and did not find it helpful to learning.

Netgalley ARC - 3.5 rounded up, this is a good, basic non-fiction primer on mollusks. I think the "word-wise" and critical thinking questions were great, but the pages had very different amounts of text. I think a little more consistency in text density would be great.

One of a set of six little biology books, but one that probably tries too hard to get too much across. Here are molluscs, and so everything from sea slugs to garden snails to oysters and their pearls and beyond to lobsters. By the time everything has been defined, and we've looked at what eats them and which of them we eat, the final four pages about climate change really mean we've zipped from species to species and back again pretty much in vain. I think the "all about cuttlefish", then "all about scallops" then "all about x, y or z" approach would have made this more coherent. And yes to climate change as a subject when it is in the immediate future of the species, but not over four pages, when you've not put a word to evolution because too many American primate schools don't like that as much. Hopefully not the best representative of this series – two and a half stars.

I received this book as an arc from Net Galley and as such am not paid for this review. Overall this book was very informative, but it didn’t feel as kid friendly as I was hoping it might be. The text was wordy and felt overbearing on the page. I appreciated that the text was well written and researched but the balance between pictures and words just didn’t live up to what I had hoped it might. This would be great for upper elementary to middle school students. It struggled to keep my interest and it might be a struggle for students to fall in love with this book as well.