If You Decide to Go to the Moon by Faith McNulty

This isn't a bedtime book. Thirty something pages of text, dense Steven Kellogg illustrations you could stare at all evening, a story that takes its time. If you pick it up at 7:45 when your kid is already rubbing their eyes, you've made a choice.

Read it in the afternoon instead. That's where this book lives.

The premise is the hook, and it's a good one. The whole book is written to the reader. Not about a character. To your kid. If you decide to go to the Moon in your own rocket ship... and then, step by careful step, what you'll need and what will happen and what it will feel like. Your five-year-old isn't reading about an astronaut. They are the astronaut.

That small pivot does something a reference book can't. It makes kids plan. What will you take. What will you wear. What will you eat. Mine lay on the floor thinking about this for half a weekend. Drew a packing list. Argued with her brother about whether you could bring a cat. The book didn't tell her to do any of that. It just held the door open.

The science is real and it lands differently because of the framing. You'll weigh a sixth of what you do on Earth. There's no air, no weather, no sound. You need a suit or you will die. McNulty doesn't soften any of that and she doesn't dramatise it either. She just tells you. When the facts are part of your own trip, they stop being information and become problems to solve. Knowing how weight changes across the solar system is a fact. Having to figure out how to walk in a sixth of yours is a puzzle.

Steven Kellogg's illustrations reward slow looking. Every page has detail that pays off on the fifth read and the tenth. Little labels on the rocket interior. Bags and instruments and food packets to identify. A cat somewhere, which I will not spoil.

One honest flaw. It is long. And it drags slightly in two spots, the description of the view from the Moon and the explanation of coming back. Four-year-olds will squirm. Despite what the cover suggests, this is really a six and seven year old book. The Apollo-era framing also shows its age. American flag to plant, rubbish to bring home, astronauts who look like the ones in the 1960s history books. None of that breaks the book. It just dates it.

The ending is what stays. You come home. You go outside at night. You look up at the Moon. You know what's up there now in a way you didn't at the start of the book. That's the whole argument. That's what the book wants your child to carry around afterwards. The kids who grow up on this book are exactly the ones who'll watch the next astronauts loop around the Moon and feel like they've already been there.

Who it's for. Kids who plan. Kids who want to know what's in the emergency kit and what happens if something goes wrong. Kids who like lists and instructions and what-order-things-happen-in. Not every kid. But if yours already loved The Darkest Dark, this one belongs in the same stack.