Usborne built the Beginners series for the moment a child stops being read to and starts reading alone. The sentences are short, the type is large, and each spread is laid out so a page of real information never looks like homework: one photograph big enough to carry the page, small numbered drawings beside it, and a joke tucked into a speech bubble at the foot.

Foals, on pages 10 and 11, runs a chestnut foal through its first hour: three small drawings taking it from its mother licking it clean to its first wobbly steps, then a photograph of it drinking from its mother on straw, captioned as one hour old. A green box at the top of the facing page notes that a few hours after birth a foal can already run fast enough to keep up with the herd. Life in a herd, across pages 4 and 5, is built around a photograph of horses grazing together, and explains that one mare bosses the others and the single stallion runs at the back. Working horses, on pages 26 and 27, sets a Yakut pony pulling a sleigh through snow near the North Pole against a photograph of a racehorse field mid race, with two small panels on how police horses are trained to stay calm in a crowd.

Thirty two pages at about 6.1 by 8.3 inches, measured at Lexile 630L, written by Anna Milbourne and illustrated by Giacinto Gaudenzi. Big enough to read flat on the floor, small enough for a school bag.

Paperback, 32 pages, 6.1 by 8.3 in (156 by 210 mm), from the Usborne Beginners series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., November 2024. ISBN-13 9781835404010. Publisher age guidance: 4 and up.

The same series covers a different subject in Beginners: Weather and Beginners: Caterpillars and Butterflies. For a younger animal lover, Who's on the Farm Today? is a board book with the same subject and no reading required.

Two more Usborne Beginners readers joined the shelf: Beginners: Trees, on how a tree feeds itself and who lives in one, and Beginners: Storms and Hurricanes, on lightning, dust storms and gales.