Ripley's Believe it or Not! Dare to Look, by Geoff Tibballs
    This book presents readers with weird, gross, and interesting facts, people, and feats. This book is highly engaging with plenty of photographs and short paragraphs or sentences of text to describe the picture. The book includes facts and tellings about animals, feats, people, food, nature, science, and more. Some of my favorite topics are the people that can manipulate their face in different ways, the people who have done amazing feats like "urban climbing." Some of the topics, however, are stomach-churning like the cakes made to look like zombie cakes with skin and stitches or the massive spider infestations whose webs almost looks like snowbanks. Other topics like people getting "buried alive" by blankets of snow covering their car serve as cautionary and scary tales. There are so many topics that at least one of them would be interesting for most students. This book won the 2013 Parent's Choice Award.
      This book would be most appropriate in fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade classrooms. Students need some level of maturity to read some of the information in the book since it can be extremely gross or scary. I would love to have this book in my classroom library for students to freely browse. Additionally, this book would be a great way to begin a lesson about a certain topic. For instance, if students are about to learn about amphibians and reptiles, I could show them the picture of the translucent frog or the albino turtle and they could read the informational paragraph about them. This could get students excited about studying these types of animals more than just explaining the different types of amphibians and reptiles. Teachers should also be aware that some content and pictures may not be suitable for some classrooms. For example, the tattooed woman's picture in the book is slightly revealing for a school context. Teachers should look through the book first and then use their best judgment.