fantastic book for kids between the ages of 8 to 12, depending on their interests. (even if the book says it’s for kids  10 years and up)

what i loved:
- this shares a lot of great information in a very easy to understand way. 

- it gives the basic information to a lot of things so that kids can go and find more answers in the specific topics they are more interested in

- it is written in a way that makes it easy for kids to understand but dienst dumb it down too much or oversimplifies it. 

- it has very nice kid friendly illustrations but not in a childish way that some kids that are a bit older wouldn’t find interesting anymore. 


what i think could have been done a bit better: 

- it’s a bit too focused on explaining some sections for pages and pages and keeps mentioning it later -for example stories and food used as examples to explain things- on as well while other things -for example how humans are responsible for the death of too many other species be it animals or other human like species- are just breezed over. 

- some of the language is sadly a bit too much how we use it right now. for example “selfie” is used in this book. but maybe in just a few short years that word won’t be used anymore, since just a few short years ago nobody said it either. it’s just the first example i can think of but there where a few moments in the book that i wished the book would use that specific word since that might make the book outdated in just a few short years -language wise!- for which is sad since the story itself certainly won’t be. 

- the illustrations are beautiful, but the kids in the book look at least teenager age (if i would have had to guess the age of most of the kids illustrated in the book i would at least say 14) why? this book is targeted towards middle grade aged kids, why couldn’t there also be a few 8-12 year olds? 
is that a big issue? of course not. but it’s something i just don’t understand? especially since in a few illustrations there are kids that look more the age the book is targeted towards. 

- the end feels pretty rushed.
the book spends most of its time trying to explain how our earliest ancestors might have lived and spend their days. which is great! 
but the last m, i don’t know 20-30 pages are all of a sudden a rush of information about how humans spread out over the globe and became responsible for mass extinction and also shared that kids also have a voice they can use to stop things they thing are not as they should be, especially in efforts to help save animals and the planet. 
there a no real explanations given for any of that -there are simply not enough pages for that left. 
i think it would have been either better o leave this first book in this series (since that is what it’s marketed and sold as, the first in the unstoppable us series) to just explaining how humans came to be and stop at that and leave the book of with “in the next one you will learn how humans spread all over the world and changed it drastically by doing so” and would have had an entire book dedicated to that topic, going more in depth how humans traveled as they did and why that might be and all of that. 
as it is in this book? we don’t get any of those answers at all. 
i don’t know if the next book will give those, i don’t know what that one is about so maybe. 
but i felt a bit disappointed that after a mostly fantastically done book filled with the beginnings of o her history one of our biggest things -living all over the world and traveling along it- was left to just a few spare sentences and closing sections. 


all in all? 

great book especially for the younger middle grade age group and one that i hope will be used a lot to teach the beginnings of our own species in simple and understandable ways as done in this book.