Kelly Milner Halls has written an accessible non-fiction text which delicately balances speculation, research, anecdote, and cultural reference. ALIEN INVESTIGATION has plenty of "what-if" factor that will invite younger readers to consider thoughtfully the possibilities of spacecraft and life on other planets.

Halls gently invites the reader to visit the book and to consider these possibilities making no claim for any of the inclusions in the book to be "true."

As a multimodal text, ALIEN INVESTIGATION is pleasing to the eye with its deep blacks and mysterious greens. Some pages look like File Tabs wherein Halls, an expert researcher and careful reporter, digs deeper into the subject by calling up scientists, military officials, screenplay writers, even a Kentucky librarian with an anecdotal account of a childhood experience.

In fewer than 70 pages, Halls is able to break down sightings over a continuum of 60 year, offering sites and scenarios. Further, Halls offers the types of spacecraft reported and how they have been credited or seemingly discredited by larger governing bodies.

Interwoven into the text is the story of an alien who boards a ship with a crew and makes his way to earth, a gentle suggestion that how we receive the idea of life on other planets is indicated by how we treat the very subject in our everyday conversations.

ALIEN INVESTIGATION will be an immediate hit with younger boy readers already interested in space and aliens. Halls, like Loree Griffin Burns and Tanya Lee Stone, are leading the way as authors ready to be included in the new focus on non-fiction standards in the ELA classroom.

Halls has already made herself welcome with a number of engaging titles. ALIEN INVESTIGATION is another "can't-miss" for Halls, an author who should be celebrated for her dedication to process and her attention to the needs of younger non-fiction readers.