Real or Fake? 2: More Far-out Fibs, Fishy Facts, and Phony Photos to Test for the Truth

In this follow-up to 2016’s Real or Fake?, Krieger presents dozens of brief, headline-worthy tales, then asks readers to determine which are real and which are made up, with the answers revealed after a page turn (an illustrated “Fib-o-Meter” reveals each item’s level of veracity). Savvy readers may spot several of the fake stories (the case of Yuri Lukovich, a man purportedly injected with badger DNA, reads like a superhero origin story gone wrong). But plenty of unlikely stories are entirely true: in Germany, a woman did claim to be stalked by a squirrel and called the police, and there is such a thing as a beard tax. Even the fictional stories often have some tangential truths at their core: although there aren’t hotel rooms in Sydney, Australia, with beds made from slabs of stone, there is an ice hotel in Sweden. Constructed of overlapping photographs in a way that recalls a cobbled-together ransom note, Cocotos’s collages bring an off-kilter energy to the pages, just right for this array stories that are too wild to be believed—or shouldn’t be. Ages 8–12. (July)