Thank you for letting me enjoy this book. It is such a beautiful journey through time. I just love the pictures.

Hmmm… Not quite what I expected, but at the same time I had little idea how they would go about this. 13,000 miles of defences, of varying kinds, centuries of history – and all in one short kids non-fiction book? I think what I expected was something a bit more flowing, more linear – either along the Wall, or through time, showing the changes, progression and so on. What we do get are large and highly impressive double-paged spreads, of isolated instances of conflict, diplomacy and progress. But I found that once we’d left the annotated area map behind, what and where we were each time registered less and less, and it was left entirely to us to fill in the gaps with how fortifications evolved and expanded.

Either way, the craft in the visuals is wonderful, and the images are heavily labelled, so if we didn’t know what a drawbridge is, we do now. We also have a secondary aspect to all this – the Where’s Wally game, where first we think we just have to find a magical Chinese fox in every image (or at least his bum and tail as he dives for cover) but actually have a list each time of other things to spot. The fact these are in neck-wrenching margins, both horizontal and printed vertically on their sides, and come with helpful bullet point details, was too much of an annoyance for me.

So yes, this remained flawed, although I welcome this kind of book for being out there, for many a reader will want such an item as a souvenir in the first place. I found it too bitty, the vertical printing down the edges frustrating, and I thought that if the Chinese history and the names whose pronunciation we always remain guessing at felt patchy, then the enemies the other side of the Wall were too, and more so. “Yada yada yada Mongols, yada yada that Gols, yada yada own goals...” Yes, I may have expected something implausibly narrative and showing all the dots to be connected when there were far too many dots (something between the end product and the closing historical timeline), but these snapshots over the millennia didn’t quite work for me.