What is Money?

What is Money? is one of four books in Crabtree’s “All About Money” series. Each book begins in exactly the same way in terms of its opening two pages of text (see Excerpt above), with the exception of the last two lines which delineate that particular book’s purpose. Each book is a mixture of factual information, doled out in short chunks, and a simple storyline.

In the “All About Money” series, illustrator Beatriz Castro provides inclusive, cartoon-like artwork in which the content contained in the characters’ speech balloons links with the main text, usually by personalizing some aspect of that factual text. For example, Hubbard’s main text reads:

Leo is nearly seven. But he can’t ever remember seeing any money in his house. This is because his dad does his supermarket shopping online , his mom buys clothes with her credit card , and his sister pays for things using her phone.

The speech balloon above Leo’s head says, “They say they are buying things – but where is the money hidden?” The answer to Leo’s question is found in the speech bubble above a burglar: “Most people keep their money safe in a bank. They use cards, phones, and online banking to spend it.”

Storywise, physical money suddenly appears in Leo’s life in the form of a 10 dollar bill, a gift contained inside a birthday card. As the story continues, Leo learns how money came into being, beginning with bartering and how :

...money was invented to replace bartering. The first money was not paper bills and coins. Instead, people used grain, iron tools, and seashells as money. Any object could act as money, as long as everyone agreed on what it was worth.

Though Leo had a number of ideas on how to spend all of his newfound wealth, he and his mother end up at a bank where they open up an account for Leo and deposit his $10.00. Oddly, the bank manager (that’s not the real odd part) gives Leo a bankbook, an object which has, according to my bank-employed son, not been issued in years. This section also contains either an unfortunate typo or an egregious math error. On p. 24, Leo’s father tells him that his “bank account has an interest rate of 1%.” When Leo asks how much he will get from the interest, his mother replies, “If you put your $10 in the bank for a year, the bank will give you $1 more.” Either Mom is poor at math, or Dad misspoke (or a proofreader missed a typo).

Ultimately, in terms of the storyline, Leo decides to use “his money in several different ways”. He will save half, give $2.00 to a charity and spend the remaining $3.00 on a model car.

The closing three pages in the books in the “All About Money” series consist of a five-question multiple choice “Quiz” page, a “Money Words” page that defines words that have been bolded in the text and a page of “Money facts” trivia. In What is Money?, one of the facts is that “Paper money is printed on giant rolls and then cut into the rectangular pieces we carry in our wallets.”

What is Money? addresses the history of money in a manner that is accessible to its intended audience and serves as a good introduction to the contents of the other three books in the “All About Money” series.