An Usborne Beginners reader on volcanoes, built the way the series always is: short sentences, large type, and a full color photograph or painted illustration on every page, so a child reading alone is never facing a wall of text.

Fiery fountains photographs a jet of lava spraying out of Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion against a clear blue sky, explains that runny lava lets gas bubble out gently instead of exploding, and adds in a box that the tallest lava fountain on record stood five times higher than the Eiffel Tower. Red hot rivers runs a glowing lava river down a dark slope at dusk and sets two illustrations beside it, one of lava breaking into rough chunks as it cools and one of it setting into smooth swirls, with a note that thick lava creeps slowly enough for people and animals to get clear. Hot water, on pages 16 and 17, leaves the eruption behind for a photograph of Japanese snow monkeys sitting up to their shoulders in a steaming spring heated by the ground beneath it, and adds that hot spring water heats swimming pools in Iceland.

Thirty two pages at about 5.9 by 8.0 inches, measured at Lexile 870L, written by Stephanie Turnbull and illustrated by Andy Tudor. A slightly smaller page than the rest of the series, and the strongest reading level of these five.

Paperback, 32 pages, 5.9 by 8.0 in (150 by 204 mm), from the Usborne Beginners series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., March 2026. ISBN-13 9781836053286. Publisher age guidance: 4 and up.

Beginners: Earthquakes and Tsunamis is its pair, on the shaking that comes from the same moving plates. Look Inside Volcanoes and Earthquakes puts both subjects under more than fifty flaps, and Beginners: Weather is the same series on a different force.

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.