Roaring Rockets by Tony Mitton

Ages 3–5 (works well down to about 2)

Some kids don't want to know how a rocket feels. They want to know what it's called. The bit on top, the bit that falls off, the bit with the little flag. This is the book for that kid.

Roaring Rockets is part of the Amazing Machines series, which means rhyming text, bold flat illustrations, and a clear job to do: get a kid interested in a vehicle by naming all its parts. Tony Mitton was a poet before he wrote picture books, and you can hear it. The rhymes don't trip. The rhythm carries you through, even at the end of a long day.

Three animals climb into the rocket. Rabbit, Bird and Mouse. Owl stays behind to mind things, which is a small but lovely echo of Michael Collins watching the lunar module disappear over the Moon's horizon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked. Most three-year-olds won't clock that. But it's there for the parent on read number forty.

The trip itself is short. Countdown, blast-off, atmosphere, lunar lander, moonwalk, splashdown, helicopter pickup. There's no story tension. Nobody learns anything. The book is essentially a vocabulary tour with a thin narrative ribbon tied around it. If your kid wants emotional weight, this isn't the one. They'll want The Darkest Dark or There's No Place Like Space.

But if they want the words, this is gold. By the end they know "lunar lander" and "booster rocket" and "splashdown" and they will use those words without prompting. A friend's two-year-old once pointed at a fire engine and shouted "lunar lander," and that's roughly the level of confidence Roaring Rockets gives them.

The art is direct and bright and easy to take in at distance, which matters when you're reading on a sofa with a kid who keeps wandering off. Ant Parker's style is unfussy. Big shapes. Strong colour. Nothing precious. Pages don't reward forty seconds of staring the way Steven Kellogg's do in If You Decide to Go to the Moon. You read these and move on, and that's fine. It's a different kind of book.

Two small honest notes. The animals don't put their helmets on until they're already on the Moon, which scientifically would have killed them before page four. And the rocket itself is a sort of pretend Saturn V with no era attached, so if your kid is the type who'll one day care that Apollo and Artemis are different missions, this book won't help with that. Neither of these will bother a three-year-old. They might bother you on read number eighty.

What I love most is the end pages, which the book calls "Rocket Bits." A diagram with every part labelled. This is the page they'll go back to. They will point. They will ask. You will end up looking up "what does a launch escape system do" at 9pm. Books that send you to Wikipedia are doing their job.

Who it's for: kids two to four who already love vehicles, or kids you're trying to hook on space gently. Especially good for the kid who likes to repeat new words back at you. Less good for kids who need stories with feelings.

If they get hooked on rockets and want to know what real ones look like now, the Artemis II crew flew past the Moon last year and watched a 54-minute eclipse from the far side. If they want to know what it would actually feel like to stand up there, they'd weigh about a sixth of what they weigh now. They'll probably want to try jumping.