Rubber is used to make many things we use every day, including balls, and bicycle wheels, and the soles of shoes. Rubber shows up in so many products it’s hard to imagine a time in history when it didn’t exist. Bounce: A Scientific History of Rubber by Sarah Albee talks about that history and how a simple product came to be in wide use.

Eileen Ryan Ewen’s illustrations are playful and fun, often showing one of the better known qualities of rubber: it bounces. Indigenous people began making rubber in a round shape that bounced thousands of years ago. In the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s scientists in Europe and the United States experimented with other ways to use it. They created things like erasers, balloons, and waterproof shoes and clothing.

Every few pages throughout the book, a section talks about the science behind rubber, answering questions like: Why is it stretchy? Why does it melt in heat and get brittle in cold? How can it be molded and shaped?

For me, those sections didn’t match the tone of the rest of the book, as they were more technical and discussed advanced science. As such, they took me out of the story being told. They’re easy to skip over in a read-aloud, though, so depending on the child being read to, they can be included or not.

A timeline at the end highlights milestones in rubber production and use through the years. There’s also a note about some of the disturbing details about it, like the fact that workers in many parts of the world who farm it and create products with it have been mistreated and abused. And the demand for rubber has created environmental problems. It’s important that the complete story of rubber is told, and these side notes do so in a sensitive way.

The publisher provided a copy of this title in exchange for my honest review.