Hidden Depths: Amazing Underwater Discoveries (Hidden! Series)
Nine short tales of astonishing things found beneath the sea, from shipwrecks to sunken cities to a fish that was thought to be extinct, until one turned up in a fishing net.
Researching a nonfiction book is difficult. Writing a non-fiction book in accessible language that will appeal to kids is difficult. Illustrating it with accurate but attractive drawings is perhaps the most difficult of all.
And yet "Hidden Depths: Amazing Underwater Discoveries" is the work of just one person, renaissance woman Tina Holdcroft.
Holdcroft, who has illustrated more than 30 children's books, manages to juxtapose cartoon-like drawings with scientific and technical illustration, smoothing it all over with a truly gorgeous sense of color. Many of the book's facts are conveyed in speech balloons, a perfect medium for short, digestible snippets of information. "My football-sized head hides a brain the size of a grape," the coelacanth (that's the fish that wouldn't die) says directly to the reader. "I can swim on my back and stand on my head." The book is also packed with jokes and asides like "You're ugly!" one ancient sea creature snipes at another, who fires back, "Dry up, you old fossil."
Holdcroft skips the obvious sea stories that even young readers have probably heard before. There is no Titanic, no Pompeii. Instead, she writes of the world's oldest lighthouse (built outside Alexandria in 285 BCE, sunk by an earthquake in 1303); a mighty 17th century Swedish warship that sank on its maiden voyage a mile from shore; freakish deep-sea creatures that have adapted to live near undersea volcanoes; a civil war submarine that was the first to sink a ship; and a spaceship wreck in the Atlantic, where the astronaut nearly drowned.
Hidden Depths is the latest addition to the Hidden! series, which includes Hidden Worlds: Amazing Tunnel Stories (which Holdcroft illustrated) and Hidden Treasure: Amazing Stories of Discovery (which she wrote and illustrated). Hidden Depths isn't an activity book, but it does include three games: a treasure hunt maze, a board game on the history of underwater breathing, and an illustration of a 17th-century village with anachronisms like a motorcycle and a satellite dish to find.
