This colorful and accessible title offers the scientific as well as the practical for the beginning reader. Gibbons (My Baseball Book, p. 475, etc.) provides a brief history of the apple, an explanation of how the apple grows from flower to fruit, and how apples are picked, processed, and sold. She also provides a recipe for apple pie, shows how an apple press makes apple cider, and illustrates some popular apple varieties. Each page has only a few lines of text, and a full-color drawing. For example, Gibbons states: "An apple is a firm, crisp fleshy fruit with a hard center called a core. The core has five seed chambers." The accompanying illustration shows an apple inside and out, with core, stem, skin, seed chambers, and seeds carefully labeled. She concludes with additional statistics and facts about apples. Betsy Maestro's How Do Apples Grow (1992), a Let's-Read-and-Find Out Science title on the same reading level, provides much more detail on the development of the apple, discussing and labeling flower parts pollen, pollination, and the developing fruit. This title illustrates more apple varieties, and includes a recipe. School and public libraries will certainly welcome this addition to the crop. (Nonfiction. 6-8)
