Bringing cities to life with Lonely Planet books

This Autumn, Lonely Planet Kids have published two fantastic books aimed at bringing cities to life for children. As a family we love to travel and explore, and Lonely Planet Kids aims to kick-start the travel bug. Through their books they love to showcase the quirky facts, amusing tales and inspiring stories that bring our planet to life.

The first book that we looked at is How Cities Work (affiliate link), aimed at readers aged 7 years plus, a full colour hardback with 24 thick pages of flaps to lift and pages to fold out. 

The book begins with how a city is born, and moves on to cover the different areas of the city and what goes on in them, how a city is run, all the different things that happen in cities, and what a city of the future might look like. Most of the pages fold out entirely, and the pages are full of flaps to lift and find out more. For example, what is going on inside the rooms in a high-rise, and what can you see at the museum or theatre.

As well as the fun of lifting the flaps, there is plenty of information packed into the pages. Interesting little facts are presented in an easy to understand and fun way, and it's the sort of book that you can dip in and out of and discover something new each time. It's a book for children to explore on their own, and have fun while they are learning.

The second books is The Cities Book (affiliate link), a large hardcover book containing double page spreads devoted to 86 of the world's greatest cities.

There's a map at the front where you can choose which city to explore first, or else they are grouped by continent. It can be used either as a reference book, to find out about a particular city, or as a book to browse through, and learn something different with each reading.

Each city page includes factual information about the city, plenty of lovely big photographs, as well as colourful hand drawn illustrations, and fact boxes. It's written with children in mind, so there are snippets about what life is like for children growing up in different places. For example in Tromso in Norway for two months of the year the sun never rises, so the children living there have to go to school in the dark!

These books would make fantastic stocking fillers for children this Christmas.

We received these books to review, Amazon links are affiliate.