How Would You Survive as an Aztec contains a wealth of information on, as the book calls it, "The Age of the Aztecs" (roughly 1300-1500 A.D.). This book starts out with a time spiral (rather than a time line) which resembles a filmstrip reel loosened and depicts events from roughly 100,000 BC to the early 1990's, which is a nice way for young readers to get a visual idea of how long ago Aztec civilization, as depicted in this text, thrived. From there, the reader is given basic facts on Aztec life, a simple map of the Aztec world (with graphic depictions of items grown, caught, or made in various locations to give the reader an idea of how large and diverse Aztec society was).

Then the book becomes something a little different, each two page spread depicts a specific area of Aztec society and the reader is treated as if they were an Aztec asking questions like Where would You live; Who would you live with?; What would you wear?; Who would your enemies be? And so on, right up until the end of the empire (the arrival of Cortes). Each two page section contains a "main" block of descriptive text and a large photo or illustration and this is surrounded by numerous smaller illustrations and descriptions to go with them, really giving the reader a lot to look at, absorb and learn about. In some ways this is a bit distracting, it's hard to pick one thing to focus on...but it's also good because it makes this a book that you could go back to time and again and find something new on each page.

I give it four stars, How Would You Survive as an Aztec is accessible for young readers (about ages 8-12), provides good source material for reports, but would also be fun to pick up and browse through for fun and the drawings and illustrations are informative and well done. There is even a glossary at the back. We will definitely be adding a copy of this to our library if we can find a used one reasonably priced...if not, I'm certain we'll check this out of the library many times! ( )