Three new titles in Crabtree’s “The Lands, Peoples, and Cultures” series, Vietnam: The Land, Vietnam: The People, and Vietnam: The Culture are the products of team-based research and writing, co-ordinated by prolific editor-in-chief, Bobbie Kalman. Vietnam: The Land offers an overview of the country’s history and geography. Vietnam: The People provides a glimpse of how the Vietnamese live, work, and play. Vietnam: The Culture touches on the ways art, food, fashion, and religion express and celebrate what it means to be Vietnamese. Each of the books can stand alone. However, readers fortunate enough to encounter them in a “land, people, culture” sequence are more likely to pick up on the sense of initial discovery and subsequent peeling-back of layers that is key to both good travel and effective learning.

There are elements of these new books that delight. Visually, all three books are impressive. In keeping with the series’ established look, each front cover features an outstanding coloured photograph. Between the covers, on average, at least half of every two-page spread is dedicated to high-quality, attractively arranged, and well-documented colour photos. This pictorial feast will delight readers for whom “a picture’s worth a thousand words.” However, the overall brevity of the 32-page books will cause others to rate the picture-to-text ratio as high, possibly even too high.

The Vietnam trilogy is written at an introductory level at best. Kalman and crew have assembled basic facts competently but demonstrate little flair for presentation. The traditional delivery of sentences in compact paragraphs lacks the pizzazz most eight to 12-year-old readers of contemporary non-fiction have become accustomed to. The minimal use or absolute absence of such value-added features as sidebar highlights, trivia bullets, fact summaries, hands-on activities, and further reading lists could cause institutional customers to investigate the market more fully before making their purchase decisions.

The Vietnam trilogy is also weakened by a number of curious editorial and design oversights and omissions. Interesting information about cover and title page photos, available on the flip side of the title page, isn’t labelled or highlighted in any way. Few readers are likely to find it as it is effectively hidden among acknowledgments, credits, and bibliographic detail. Similarly, another “buried” verso note advises that the illustration gracing the books’ back covers depicts a sarus crane, a symbol of loyalty and long life. Readers who stumble on the note will be disappointed that nowhere in any of the three books is there any other reference to the bird or the folklore associated with it. Further contributing to the impression of somewhat higgledy-piggledy production is the intriguing but unexplained and inconsistent use of artistic motifs to emphasize subject headings.

Most glaring, though, is an unexplained bolding of words throughout the texts of all three of the Vietnam books. Educated readers are likely to assume, given that the books have glossaries, that the bolding signals a glossary listing. This is not consistently the case, however. When editors and publishers purport to provide reading and learning supports such as bold print and glossaries, they owe young readers context, clear direction, and consistency.

The primary strengths of Vietnam: The Land, Vietnam: The People, and Vietnam: The Culture are their visual appeal, their up-to-date information about Vietnam, and the reasonable cost of the paperback editions. Anyone interested in more detail, a more contemporary style and presentation format, more editorial commitment, and single rather than multiple volume coverage for eight to 12-year-olds may want to check out Hamish Hamilton’s Focus On… series, Wayland’s Countries of the World series, and Gareth Stevens’ Children of the World series.