This unique persuasive text takes the form of a fictional holiday to Mars, presenting factual information about the red planet. The text draws comparisons between Earth and Mars, and considers aspects of space travel such as weightlessness and the lack of oxygen.

* Purple/ Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary

* Text type - A persuasive text.

* A pictorial glossary is provided on pages 22 and 23 encouraging discussion and reinforcement of technical terms.

* Curriculum links - Numeracy: Space, shape and measure; Science: Forces and movement; Geography: Contrast with the local area.

* This book is paired with a story on the same theme: Star Boy's Surprise by Jana Hunter.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 24 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books. Mark Ruffle studied graphic design and then worked as an art editor for Oxford University Press, before becoming a freelance illustrator and designer. When he's not drawing animals or spaceships, among other things, he enjoys walking his dogs and cycling in the Cotswolds, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. Janice Marriott is an award-winning children's author, of both fiction and non-fiction, most recently winning the 2007 NZ Post Junior Fiction award for Thor's Tale. Janice lives and works in central Wellington.