Pop-Up London

by Jennie Maizels

Overview

Explore some of London's most famous sites in an engrossing novelty book.

Welcome to the great city of London! Are you ready for your tour? Open this inviting, large-format book and follow the river Thames as it winds through the heart of the celebrated capital. Peer inside Buckingham Palace, spin the London Eye, whisper in Saint Paul’s Cathedral gallery, and raise the historic Tower Bridge. Lift the flaps, and you’ll find famous faces, spooky stories, and surprising secrets. Turn the book around to look inside buildings and find out even more. Be inspired by the magic of London in three dimensions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781406321579
Publisher:	Walker & Company
Publication date:	10/28/2011
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)
Age Range:	5 - 9 Years

About the Author

Jennie Maizels is the author-illustrator of numerous books for children, including Jennie Maizels' Things to Do Book. She lives in England.

Editorial Reviews

This pop-up guide to London includes three-dimensional depictions of Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Trafalgar Square, as well as interactive components like mini-books, flaps, and seek-and-find activities. Maizels’s paper engineering makes optimal use of space: by rotating the book, readers can peer at a performance inside the Globe Theatre, glimpse a royal wedding inside Westminster Abbey, and see artifacts on display at the Natural History Museum. Packed with facts and profiles of famous Brits, it’s a detail-rich and informative tour of London, no passport required. Ages 5–9. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Just in time for the Olympics, this full-blast bells-and-whistles book teems with graphic pop.
—The New York Times

Packed with facts and profiles of famous Brits, it’s a detail-rich and informative tour of London, no passport required.
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Gr 1–5—With the 2012 Summer Olympics now merely months away, books about the city on the Thames should be in high demand. This attractive title could easily take center stage in any such themed display. With the London Eye, the Palace of Westminster, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the more recent Gherkin, London has one of the world's most distinctive and recognizable skylines, which lends itself well to the format. Using the river Thames as the thread between the pages, the book starts at Kew Gardens and ends, appropriately, at the newly constructed Olympic Park, before heading out to the North Sea. The pop-ups open easily and require little manipulation (instruction is given when needed, such as lifting Tower Bridge so that a boat can pass under) and would probably hold up well in circulation. There are flaps to lift and open to discover information about famous London inhabitants, notable ghosts that haunt the city, and secrets and ephemera. These factoids are all incorporated around a theme for each spread: "Power, Pigeons, and Premieres," for instance, introduces readers to Number 10 Downing Street, Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, Charlie Chaplin, and Margaret Thatcher. Turning the book around allows readers to look inside the pop-ups, revealing more facts and trivia about the city and its sweeping history. London iconography-black taxi cabs, red double-decker buses, beefeaters-act as friendly markers along the journey. As a book that is both eye-catching and instructional, Pop-Up London is a treat.—Kara Schaff Dean, Walpole Public Library, MA

School Library Journal

Deucedly clever paper engineering allows young visitors to spin the London Eye, raise Tower Bridge for a ship's passage and more in this spit-spot tour along the Thames. Two landmarks (the aforementioned Eye and the building aptly dubbed "The Gherkin") require manually folded tabs to stay upright, but no other assembly is required. With infectious enthusiasm, Maizels squires viewers from Kew Gardens to Olympic Park--pausing along the way to toss out famous names, physical and historical facts, ghost stories and "find-this" challenges. Opening each of the five spreads raises a grand array of selected structures crowded along the winding river's banks. These are depicted in fine but clear detail and, mostly, printed on both sides so that turning the display around affords glimpses of interiors as well as additional boxed factlets. Glued flaps on every spread lift to reveal introductory comments and one-sentence introductions to famous Londoners of (mostly) the past, while small images of taxis, corgis, Trafalgar Square pigeons and Union Jacks add dashes of local color. A grand panorama, though because the geography is, to say the least, creative and the stately buildings are barely even a representative sampling of what London has to offer, this is more a keepsake than a tourist's guide. (Pop-up/nonfiction. 6-10)

Kirkus Reviews