Superpower Field Guide – Eels

Rachel Poliquin's Eels is a Superpower Field Guide for 8 year olds that makes one very ordinary eel look like a superhero.

What happens

Meet Olenka. She's a European eel, the colour of mud, living in a quiet river in Russia. She hasn't moved more than a hundred yards in eighteen years. Pretty boring, right?

Wrong! Olenka can breathe through her skin. She can leave her river, wriggle across a damp meadow and survive out of water for two whole days. When she was tiny she climbed the rocks beside a waterfall as high as a ten-storey building.

Each trick gets its own superhero name. Oxygen Skin. Wall Crawling. The Slimetastic Safety Shield (her slime does six different jobs, and one of them is keeping her warm in winter). She's lined up against heroes kids already know, like Batman's suit, Spider-Man's sticky hands and the Hulk changing shape.

It reads like someone chatting to you, not like a textbook. The narrator talks straight to your reader, guesses what they're thinking and keeps score in a very silly test of whether an eel is really a fish or a snake in disguise. There's a true-or-false quiz too.

Running through it all is a proper mystery. Nobody has ever found a European eel egg. Ever! People have made wild guesses about where baby eels come from since ancient times, from mud to horse hairs.

The book follows the clues. There's the see-through baby that a scientist thought was a brand new fish, and two more scientists who counted tiny muscle lines on fish after fish to work out what it really was. It's detective work, and it's very satisfying.

Big words like metamorphosis and leptocephalus get explained properly (with how to say them, which helps). But it never feels like homework. It feels like being let in on a secret.

If you've got a reader who collects animal facts to announce at the dinner table, they'll come away with loads. Did you know electric eels aren't actually eels? They will.

What to read next

For another animal book built around one very big question, try The Story of Evolution. It starts with the first tiny life in the oceans and works out how all the creatures on earth came to be.