Soccer Stars

Any soccer fan would love the colorful graphic and bits of information in this book! From mini bios to big awards, the hairstyles and the controversies, players from all over he world and across the recent decades are included in this book. I'm happy to see a few women included as well. This would make a perfect gift for a young soccer player to learn about the greats! 

Thank you Netgalley and Quarto Wide Eyed Editions for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Soccer Stars by Jean-Michel Billioud is a handy guide to some of the greatest soccer players of all time. For someone like myself who isn't well-versed in soccer, it's got some good information. My husband, whose life is soccer, learned things he didn't know. The format makes it an easy read and quick to access information.

I must mention that I am NOT a fan of soccer/football at all. My son loves playing football so picked this to read alongside with him. 
Like the earlier books in this series, the illustrations are great. Bite size information and different highlights for each player attracted even a 'I don't like football at all' person like me.
There is also a timeline page in the end, to let little folk know how the game build up to today's craze!
Recommended if you have a child who likes football/soccer.

My son loved reading this book! Especially with soccer being all over the place this summer. Since we don't know much about this sport, it was nice to learn more. A great summer reading read!

I'm always asked for sports books for kids. Soccer is a very popular sport. This book was informative. I was happy to see a few women athletes included. I would have like to see a better balance but was pleased. While this book isn't on our store's bookshelf at the moment, I am going to see if we can order it in. I would definitely recommend this books to young sports fans.

This is an informative and well designed book perfect for those interested in learning more about soccer stars. The illustrations are interesting and the focus is on the information. Learn about the players and their history.

In SOCCER STARS, you get to meet the top 40 players in the world’s most popular sport. You’ll learn about Ronaldo’s most spectacular moments, Messi’s legendary left foot, meet the youngest-ever World Cup goal scorer, Pelé, and read about the most incredible saves in history. Full of fun facts about each legend, how many goals they scored and their amazing skills. 5/5

Thanks to the author, Quarto Publishing Group - Wide Eyed Editions, and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are fully mine.

#SoccerStars #NetGalley

Soccer Stars: Meet 40 Game Changers, by Jean-Michel Billioud is a children's non-fiction book.

As the title indicates, this book is focused on the top forty soccer stars in history, including Alfredo di Stefano, Stanley Matthews, Pele, Bobby Moore, David Beckham, Didier Drogba, Landon Donovan, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar, Mia Hamm, Nadine Angerer, etc. Readers will learn about facts and stats about each football player.

Soccer Stars is geared toward young children, particularly elementary school students in second to fifth grades.


Note: I received this book from NetGalley, which is a program designed for bloggers to write book reviews in exchange for books, yet the opinions expressed in this review are my own.

"Soccer Stars" is a great companion book to celebrate FIFA 2018. Real soccer advocates for sure will find this picture book a treat.

Pros:
1- Clean layout, easy to read text about the players with super cute illustrations of the athletes which capture their distinctive features and skill set. 
2- Highlights of the players' accomplishments are written in bite-size, easy to digest. 
3- The timeline about soccer history and evolution of the sport at the end of the book is a nice touch 
4- While soccer has always been a male-dominated sport, "Soccer Stars" did not forget a number of rising female players emerged in the last decade. 


Cons:
1- Growing up with family who love the sport and married a soccer fan, I do have some basic knowledge about sport, the players and the clubs they belong to. I don't know if young soccer newbies can follow the text without confusion (i.e. different names of clubs, the series, the cups, techniques etc.) It might be helpful to include the glossary list with brief explanations

2- How "inspiring"? The title says about the "inspiring icons" and I expected to read something more than just  quick resumes of the players. Take Zidane as an example. He is super gifted and talented but he also struggled a lot to be who he is regardless his natural talents as a soccer player. I don't recall anything throughout the book about the hard works and perseverance the players put in but continuously notice words like "talented," "gifted" and so forth. 

Overall, "Soccer Stars" is an absolute amazing book about the sport and the renown players. A must-have for people who enjoy soccer, probably an Ok book to most readers. Nevertheless, it is definitely a good starting point to learn a thing or two about the sport.

Fans of the world’s most followed sport can learn everything they always wanted to know, and more, in “Soccer Stars.” The top 40 players are featured, including Pelé — the youngest-ever World Cup goal scorer — Messi and his spectacular left foot, and Ronaldo with his most stunning moments. Filled with intriguing factoids about each star, goals scored and their unique achievements.

Grateful to Quarto Publishing Group - Wide Eyed Editions and NetGalley for the ARC, in exchange for my true review.

#SoccerStars #NetGalley

Everything you need to know - including if you have no idea what the fuss with soccer is all about - about 40 stars of the world round ball practitioners. Among the 40 characters features, there are the famous Maradona, Zidane or Beckham, but also regional stars or people whose careers resonate with soccer fans well at the age of retiring, such as Lev Yashin, an icon of the Soviet team in the 1960s. Clean writing, without too much speciality vocabulary with short overview of the most important career benchmarks. Not impressed by the illustrations though,

The title tells it all. I suppose since it doesn’t say these are the forty best players in history, I shouldn’t grumble too much about some of the selections, but they’re still weird.
The first image we see is an 8-bit version of a player doing a bicycle kick. It looks hilarious.
It starts with the player the great Pele called the best ever. That means a lot more than, say, fellow Argentinian Maradona saying it. (Of course I hold Maradona in such contempt that there’s no way I’d believe anything he says, but still. . .)
The most interesting fact is that Matthews, who played until he was 50, in over 700 games never received a yellow card, let alone a red. Similarly, Maldini only received one red card in 20 years and over 900 matches. These are the kind of stats I like!
As mentioned, the artwork is on the simple side, in keeping with previous volumes in this line.
As a huge fan of women’s soccer, there are many I would choose before two of the included ones. It leans heavily on present players. I am quite happy that Ronaldo—the original—was included in here, as he should be, but also with enough to show that it’s a different guy than the current Ronaldo.
As expected, heavy on forwards and low on defenders, but more goalies than I would have thought. As a former goalie, that’s fine with me!

I love this book SO MUCH!  The illustrations are so eye-catching and the information is fantastic and so very interesting.  We will definitely be purchasing this for our son's collection!

The 40 Inspiring Icons series from Quarto’s Wide Eyed Editions is a collection of books that introduce 40 people or groups who are famous in their field through short biographies. The current range includes Music Legends, Soccer Stars, People of Peace, and Greek Gods & Heroes.

Each of the four books in the 40 Inspiring Icons series so far begins with a short introduction before launching into the bios which are presented in roughly chronological order. Every bio is spread over two pages and includes a stylized cartoon of the person or group, a one-paragraph introduction to them and what they’ve done to earn a place in the book, and a handful of extra interesting facts, figures, dates, or other relevant information. Each one is very much an introduction to the person or group and is designed with kids in mind so the books work hard to keep it simple, don’t expect to read a detailed history here and fans won’t learn anything new.

Music Legends
My favorite of the four 40 Inspiring Icons books so far was Music Legends which introduced 40 groups and singers from the 1950s to today. The book contains many of the artists you would expect to find in its pages, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, but there are many who were perhaps more unexpected such as New Order and The Velvet Underground. By far the strangest inclusion was Arcade Fire who, at least in my opinion, haven’t earned the title of “legend” yet – certainly not when the likes of Metallica and Guns N Roses have been excluded. Opinion is a really key word here because this book is bound to provoke outrage over the artists it has included over those it has not. There’s a definite lean toward British indie bands here too, perfect for me, but likely to upset fans of pop, hip-hop, and other genres.

I also found it odd that in several group illustrations, band members were left out with no explanation. Queen’s illustration only includes two of the four members, as does the image of Depeche Mode, while Radiohead’s illustration depicts three of their total five – yet other bands are depicted in their entirety with eight people are squeezed into the image of the Wu-Tang Clan so this clearly isn’t an issue of space. A band line-up is rarely included in the facts which means that these missing group members are never even referred to by name, they are simply ignored. If you can let this slide, however, this is a fun introduction to many classic music artists that will prompt discussion and, hopefully, inspire you to listen to new music with your kids.

People of Peace
The next 40 Inspiring Icons title – People of Peace – introduces protestors, artists, philosophers, scientists, politicians, and more who have worked to make our world a more peaceful place. Of the four books, this is easily the one most likely to inspire deep, thought-provoking conversations and is a great reference to have around for homework or further reading after watching the news. Again, the line-up contains many faces you would expect to see such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, but there were also many names I didn’t know and many more who I did know but for other reasons, not their commitment to peace – such as Pablo Picasso and Victor Hugo.

One of my criticisms of this book comes from the assumptions it makes regarding prior knowledge. This is very much a primer for kids, yet things like the House Un-American Activities Committee are referenced with no explanation of what they were/are. You could take this as an opportunity to dig deeper and continue learning elsewhere, but in a kids primer, I believe it would be best to keep it simple and include clear explanations of anything mentioned in passing like this.

I found this book the most educational of the bunch and it made me want to go away and learn more about the people it introduced which is all you can really hope for from a book like this.

Soccer Stars
The first 40 Inspiring Icons book I actually read was Soccer Stars (titled Fantastic Footballers outside the US). I am not a football fan beyond supporting my country, but England had been performing well in the 2018 World Cup and I was riding a high which inspired me to pick it up. The book features players from every continent as well as a handful of female players which I was really pleased to see considering how easy it would have been for the authors to ignore the women’s game entirely.

Anyone familiar with the beautiful game, even in passing, will know many of the players here – Beckham, Ronaldo, Messi, and Pele are household names the world over. However, I asked my husband, a far bigger soccer fan than me, to look over the contents page which lists all the bios included in the book and he believes that Soccer Stars is likely to be even more controversial than Music Legends for who it excludes and some of the lesser players who have taken their place. He pointed out the inclusion of Paul Pogba over Thierry Henry from France or Marco Veratti over Roberto Baggio from Italy as particularly odd choices. This has possibly been done partly to balance the names out so someone is included from every continent, despite the vast majority of internationally renowned players hailing from Europe and South America.

Again, this book is designed as an introductory primer so the bios are short and cannot possibly include everything there is to know about a player – especially those with long careers or those who have done other things of note away from the pitch. Yet it does a good job of giving you a flavor of who these people are and why they have become as well-known as they are.

Greek Gods and Heroes
The final title so far – Greek Gods and Heroes – is possibly the oddest inclusion to the 40 Inspiring Icons series because it is the only one of the four to focus on fictional people over real ones. The bizarre nature of Greek mythology also means it’s the hardest to wrap your head around thanks to the endless inbreeding and confused relationships, with Zeus alone responsible for a large proportion of the mess. The book does attempt to present itself in chronological order moving down the Olympian family tree, but when people are frequently having children with their own parents, the issue does become slightly confused!

Most adults will have heard of the majority of the figures in this book – Zeus, Apollo, Medusa, and Achilles for example, but there are several lesser-known figures included here as well such as Asclepius, Tantalus, and Iphigenia. And while most of us are probably aware of these figures and have a vague recollection of what they did (Jason with his Argonauts, Achilles and his heel), we’re perhaps not as familiar with the details of their stories. I found myself shocked at just how twisted many of the tales were, despite having a general familiarity with Greek mythology. This is one book I would recommend reading along with or before your kids because some of the contents could be upsetting to those with a more sensitive disposition.

As with People of Peace, I also found that this book would introduce something without explaining it in enough detail, or would hint at things and never explain them in full. A specific example can be found in the Dionysus bio. It tells us how Hera (Dionysus’s step-mother of a sort) spent years attempting to kill Dionysus and to drive him mad, yet a note in his family tree shows that he and Hera had a child together. How on Earth did that happen? No explanation is included…

40 Inspiring Icons Series
I really loved the 40 Inspiring Icons book series and am excited to see more of them in the future as the scope for potential topics is enormous. While all four could use a little editorial clean-up and there are issues over who is included and who isn’t, they work great as introductions or quick reminders in their subject areas and I would highly recommend all four.

GeekMom received these books for review purposes.

Yea for more choices in non-fiction soccer books! Publishers provide plenty of football and baseball selections, but soccer seems to be neglected, much to the chagrin of my middle school library patrons.  With the list of 40 superstars listed in the table contents and the interesting illustrations of each, I look forward to seeing this book in its final stage as the digital advance reader copy had such alignment and spacing problems that I did not choose to read much of it.