Let's Go Traveling

In this ambitious--perhaps overly so--undertaking, Krupp ( The Comet and You ) takes readers on a jaunt to six prehistoric sites on four continents. The visually engaging, scrapbook-like pages of this variation on the Magic School Bus excursions feature tinted photographs, buttons, pages from a diary, facts and definitions,stet comma and other items from each destination. A narrator, freckled Rachel Rose, ties the journey together with excited but somewhat confining comments, as in this description: ``Except for a stone coffin, it is just a large and empty room. The walls, the floor, the ceiling--everything is stone. We're inside the Great Pyramid. We can't believe we're here!'' (Here Krupp encounters a problem inherent in travel books for the younger set: How can an author tell about a place and not shape the reader's response to it?) Also, these trips are occasionally confusing: are they real or imagined? Exactly who are the travelers? Still, much information can be gleaned from the varied art, which would-be globetrotters may well prefer to the stay-at-home text. Ages 7-10. (Mar.)