Welcome to my annual reviews of space books for children! There was a bumper crop of space-related books for kids this year; I received dozens of books for review from publishers, and bought a few more to fill out my fiction recommendations. Every book pictured on this page is one that I recommend for purchase.

This year, I was particularly interested in updating my 6- and 9-year-old children's public school library with the fact-filled nonfiction that they might use for reports on the planets, so you'll find those books listed first. Then I'll get on to more general recommendations, ordered by age group. Books can span ages, of course, so depending on what age kid you're buying for, you may want to look in the adjacent-age group for more suggestions. And the section for kids 12 and up includes many books intended for a general audience, not just kids.

I had so many books to review this year that this post needs a table of contents, so here it is:

Multi-volume nonfiction book series

In a previous post, I talked about culling old, outdated books, and how desperately they needed updated books on Mars and Mercury. Reviewing stacks of new books for the school library, I kept these questions in mind:

Are there major factual errors?

Does it provide "wow" facts in addition to dry numbers and dates?

Does it discuss some recent science?

Does it talk about things we don't yet understand, questions that motivate us, why we need to keep exploring?

Are the images well-chosen to match the text?

Is the exploration section up-to-date?

Does the exploration section mention international missions, not just NASA ones?

Clearly, not all books can do everything, especially books for younger readers, but some were better than others. Here are books I can recommend, though some are recommended with reservations.

I reviewed three sets of multi-volume books on the planets and other things in the solar system. Of these, I can recommend two, one from Capstone and one from Scholastic. Both are intended for 7- to 10-year-olds, though I think they'd still have some use for older children. For both series, the books are written by multiple authors, and not all the books in the series are of the same quality. In particular, I found the Mars and Earth books in both series to be somewhat weak compared to the rest. Both series include recent Keck Adaptive Optics images of Uranus and Neptune and discuss how both worlds have changed since Voyager 2 explored them. Overall, I have a slight preference for the Capstone series, although both series were very close to each other in quality.