It's healthy to have your prejudices overturned occasionally and Splash! has caused me immense well-being. Written by two unfamiliar but exotic names and illustrated by a third, preceded by heart-bestrewn dedications and featuring animals in a predominantly pink bathroom setting, the book creates a first impression of unmitigatedly foreign (no, worse, American) soppiness. Read on, though, and it's a brilliant exposition of the more simple properties of fluids, the ones whose effects are important at plughole level. While Penguin prepares for a bath, his friends discover all sorts of attributes of aqueous matter. It's always container-shaped (a piglet sucks it up through a curly-tail straw), it wrinkles the skin (even on an elephant), things float or sink (even soap). Condensation and surface tension are succinctly explained - and how about this for Archimedes: 'Why does the water go up when you get in? Water takes up space. You take up space. You and the water can't be in the same space at the same time, so when you get in the bath the water moves up - and sometimes over. ' Eureka! I have found a great book to share with four-and-ups, either in or out of the bath, and one whose gently humorous and utterly straightforward style will permit its enjoyable use with less able children up to 12.