Illustrations – Aaron Cushley
This book transports you to some of the world’s most extreme places: hottest, longest river, darkest, most magical, highest, deepest, most secret, most electric, harshest, stinkiest and coldest, as well as somewhere that’s out of this world.
It invites you to use your imagination, casting you as the explorer. You pack your bag, use different modes of transport and experience each location via your senses.
Along the way, you get to read the postcards you send your parents. Not all readers will have a mother and father they’d be sending postcards to if they were on a round the world adventure, though, so I would have preferred it if the postcards were addressed to a friend instead.
You’ll find a glossary at the end of the book for the trickier words.
The second person point of view was engaging. It brought to mind the Choose Your Own Adventures of my childhood (minus all of the choices). It’s the type of book where your learning is accidental because you’re busy enjoying the ride.
This journey through the senses hooked me by including ‘chocolate’ in the title. I was most looking forward to learning some new fun facts. Because this non fiction book reads like a story, it wasn’t as chock-a-block with facts as I had hoped but, having said that, I was more entertained than I’d expected.
Because I can’t read fun facts without sharing some, here are my top five:
A dromedary, which is a camel, can drink 50 gallons of water in three minutes. That’s 189 litres!
When Russian priest Fedor Konyukhov flew his balloon around the world in 2016, he survived for eleven days with only half-hour naps. To keep himself awake and avoid crashing, he held a spoon between his fingers. If he dozed off, the spoon would clank onto the floor and wake him up!
Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei survived an avalanche before becoming the first woman to climb Everest in 1975.
Venezuela’s Catatumbo lightning “lasts around ten hours every night about 297 days a year.”
Pablo Signoret, Rafael Bridi, and Guilherme Coury set a record when they walked a 656-foot-long slackline between two peaks of the French Alps, 10,000 feet above ground!
The illustrations are colourful, the amount of text per page isn’t overwhelming and the layout is uncluttered.
And the answer to the question the book’s title raises? Suffice to say, the summit of Everest may be the only place on Earth you won’t see me eating chocolate.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Charlesbridge for the opportunity to read this book.
Once Upon a Blurb
An immersive round-the-world adventure, where YOU are the explorer experiencing the most extreme places on earth and doing it all through your five senses.
Have you ever wondered what the buzz of the rainforest sounds like on a trek through the Amazon? Or how it feels to experience the biting cold as you voyage across Antarctica? Or how chocolate tastes on Mount Everest? From every heart-bursting sight to tummy-lurching smell, you will experience them all – and do so without having to leave the comforts of your couch.
This funny and fast-paced interactive thrill ride that young adventure-seekers are sure to enjoy is chock-full of facts, history, and survival tips peppered on every page.
Schizanthus Nerd 