Take an author with a degree in physics, throw in some NASA experience and an interest in children’s books and what do you get? You get children’s books reviews about space exploration containing madly detailed lists of technical flaws.
Marianne Dyson was “one of the first ten women flight controllers, working as a Flight Activities Officer in Mission Control” before she left NASA to raise her children. Because she artfully avoids telling us the true number, I’ll guess it means she was the tenth female flight controller, not the ninth or eighth or first. A precise statement would help clarify the issue.
No, I’m not being an ass. I’m exploring what it’s like to be a precision writer. Consider this book:

I Spy A Rocketship, intended for preschoolers:
Spyler and CeCe are the book’s main characters (a child and a dog) and they have to find numbers to get the rocket ship’s countdown going. At the outset, we’re not told whether CeCe or Spyler is the child, a really troubling oversight, and it just gets worse.
CeCe says he/she can’t wait to blast into space, but when Spyler says they need to check out their countdown machine first, CeCe says they can go to the moon only if they are home in time for dinner. This statement made me not care if CeCe made it to the moon or not. He/She is the kind of character who is not willing to take a risk — even delaying dinner — to accomplish anything. That’s not the kind of attitude I associate with astronauts.
In that respect, Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go is an excellent book because we can look to Dingo Dog’s temerity for risk taking as he speeds away from Officer Flossie, evading the fuzz and escaping unscathed from every car pile-up caused during the pursuit. Way to go Dingo Dog! You’re tenacious!
But on an accuracy scale, there’s NO WAY Gold Bug could get inside a different moving vehicle in every scene. After the first couple pages, I’m like, hey Gold Bug, that’s impossible, so I’m not going to look for you anymore because you’re a big fat lie.
Despite the moon book’s deficiencies, I Spy a Rocketship scored a 3.5 out of 6 on the reviewer’s accuracy scale. It’s primarily a look-and-find sort of book, but the reviewer rightly points out: did they have to make CeCe and Spyler dance at the end when they returned from the Moon before dinnertime? A real Moon trip takes longer than that!
I was even more unnerved that the reviewer kept referring to Luna as the Moon, like how people refer to Sol as the Sun instead of Sol. It’s Luna from the Latin. Moon is a generic popularization, and a rather dull one at that. Dammit people, details matter!
For the record, CeCe is the dog.
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