It's hard to believe that a life and work as complicated as Einstein's could be distilled to a Ready-to-Read chapter book, but Lakin does a fine job of highlighting the important moments, with equal focus on Einstein's early life and later successes. His three major discoveries--photons, e = mc2, and the general theory of relativity--are each given a crisp, one-page treatment that will work well for the target age group as well as older readers. The attractive watercolors seem to have been copied from familiar photographs. Although many are portraits, they move the text along. Some things, especially Einstein's relationship to the atom bomb, are lightly covered, but this is a well-rounded entry in the Stories of Famous Americans series, bolstered by a glossary, a bibliography, a time line, and several Web sites.

In the latest Akiko adventure, the fifth grader and her pals head off to their purple balloon friend Poog's home planet to save it from a threat. A deus ex machina ending (the villain turns out to be Poog's great-uncle; Akiko turns out to be immune to his mind powers) is inadequately justified in the final explanatory chapters. Crilley portrays his two-dimensional characters in occasional anime-style black-and-white cartoon art.