Publisher: Aurum Press

Some books are made for sharing and ‘The Skies Above My Eyes’ is a wonderful example of one. The book folds out into a beautifully-illustrated 2.5m long double-sided journey up through the layers of the atmosphere, with small chunks of informative text along the way.

Starting on ground level with a girl standing on a busy street, readers can follow her gaze upwards to pass towering skyscrapers, various aircraft and space vehicles and finally to planets and stars. On the reverse, the girl lays on the grass at the foot of a mountain, looking up towards birds, paragliders, through weather systems, meteoroids and comets.

Much like its predecessor ‘The Street Beneath My Feet’, this book is likely to be a huge hit in the classroom as children will love gathering around the fully folded-out pages to pore over the many details and facts hidden around the different layers of the atmosphere. The text helps to direct the reader to tiny details that they may not have already spotted in the illustrations. Reading the information from the bottom to the top on one side and then the opposite way round on the reverse feels like jumping into a spacecraft and blasting off on a trip to the ends of the solar system and then descending back to the Earth’s surface.

Yuval Zommer’s bold and bright illustrations are hugely appealing and joyful as he masterfully captures the variation of hues and textures that make the skies above us such a visual delight. The thick paper of the book’s concertina pages feels durable and ready to withstand being opened out and refolded many times.

This is a book that young readers will love to treasure and share and one that will hold a strong appeal across the whole primary age range.