Everything You Know About Sharks is Wrong!

All sharks are huge, ancient, solitary, killing machines who hunt their prey near tropical beaches…right? Wrong! There are pygmy sharks smaller than a classroom ruler, white tip reef sharks work together to hunt, sharks that live in the ocean depths, and new species of shark were found as recently as 2020.

There are over 500 species of shark that we know about, and this fascinating book explores their lives; from where they live, to how they breath. They may have a bad reputation but this book, which celebrates Shark Week 2023, highlights how important sharks are.

With bite-size chunks of easy-to-understand text, and wonderfully detailed images on every page, Everything You Know About Sharks is Wrong! is accessible to a huge range of ages. My 7-year-old daughter was wowed by the variety and diversity found in the shark world, and I (a 30-something-year-old woman) was impressed with the facts and statistics. We would recommend this to everyone, let's all become shark experts!

64 pages / Reviewed by Jemma Jeffrey, teacher

Suggested Reading Age 7+

A great book for shark enthusiasts! Everything You Know About Sharks Is Wrong is jam packed with facts and information about sharks, including their evolution, their purpose, how they reproduce, their relationships with other animals and the reality of how dangerous they actually are.

There's a useful contents page at the beginning to help children to navigate to the pages they're interested in as well as an index and glossary at the back. Each page is packed with information so it may be a little overwhelming for younger readers but there are some fantastic illustrations which help to bring the facts to life a little more.

For good readers, there is ample information to get their teeth stuck into and learn about. In my opinion, it could be improved and made much more accessible to less able readers simply by isolating some of the key facts into pop out boxes on each page. This would open the book up to younger readers who are keen to learn but aren't yet able to tackle such detailed texts, which include quite complex language.

That being said, I think it's a great book for the target audience and I'm sure many children will get a great deal out of reading it!

64 pages / Reviewed by Lucy Hopkins, teacher

Suggested Reading Age 7+