The SLOWEST Book EVER ~ Blog Tour

 Welcome to a Very Slow Blog Tour to celebrate the birthday of a book born last week:

The SLOWEST Book EVER
by April Pulley Sayre; illus. by Kelly Murphy
176 pages; ages 8-12
Boyds Mills Press, 2016

"Warning!" says the front page, "This is a S-L-O-W book. Do not read it while surfing, water-skiing,  or running to escape giant weasels." It's a book so slow that the table of contents lists: two pages "on which to rest your face"... and notes the "excruciatingly slow acknowledgments" at the end. And just to make it longer - and slower - there's a not-exactly-the-end-notes section with even more stuff to think slowly about.

So what kind of stuff goes into a SLOW book? The sorts of things you'd expect: details about metamorphosis (a slow process), turtles, slow food (yes, that's a thing), and true "snail mail" - in which messages were transmitted by actual snails.

There are slow activities: watching paint dry, creating slow-motion stories, growing bonsai trees, tai chi.

The structure of the book contributes to the philosophy of SLOW - it's just the sort of book you don't read straight through. Instead, you dip into a page or two and read. Then you sit back and drink tea and think a bit. Later, when you get around to it, you read some more.

This is just a plain fun approach to interesting facts about the world around us. Read slowly, you're bound to learn a few, like how long it takes for a saguaro cactus to grow an inch*. Or the length of time it takes to turn a grape into a raisin**. Fortunately, there's an index for the less patient of us.

Today's review is part of the STEM Friday roundup. Drop by STEM Friday blog for more science books and resources. Review copy provided by publisher.

* fifteen years
** three weeks