Learn Physics Through Stories Paperback Bundle [Paperbacks + All Digital Materials]

Five full books in print — 936 pages of story with real physics inside it, for readers ages 9–12 — plus every digital resource that goes with them: four browser games, worksheets with answer keys, simulations and bonus stories, on a private page that keeps growing.

Read a sample of three of them: The Hopeful Queen of the Clockwork Court · Allora and the Puzzles of Archimedes · Sakura and the Many-Layered Sea, from Physics Fables

The five paperbacks

• Newton's Laws: A Fairy Tale (2nd Edition) — 123 pages. Forces, motion, and Newton's three laws. The best place to start, and the newer edition, with the science woven through the story rather than collected at the back.
• The Hopeful Queen of the Clockwork Court — 294 pages, the longest book in the series. A princess who plans everything and a prince who plans nothing have two weeks to break a curse, using pressure, buoyancy, siphons, Bernoulli's principle, Archimedes' Screw and the history of timekeeping to do it.
• Allora and the Puzzles of Archimedes — 197 pages. An apprentice turns off friction by accident and has to put the world back, by way of levers, pulleys, torque and a real 2,000-year-old puzzle.
• Gravity: A Fairy Tale — 206 pages. Gravity, orbits, and falling objects, from the center of the Earth to a nearby moon, guided by the echoes of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.
• Physics Fables — 116 pages of short tales, one topic each: special relativity, density and buoyancy, magnetism, polar coordinates. The cover says ages 8–10, and it's the gentlest way into the series.

What the books do, and what they don't

These are novels first. The science arrives where the story needs it — in "Notes from the Librarian" set between the chapters, with pronunciation guides and things to try using a straw, a glass of water, or a chair that spins. The notes are optional by design; skip every one and the stories still work.

What that means in practice: none of these five books ends with a set of quantitative practice problems and a worked answer key. The math lives in the digital worksheets instead, where it's optional, and in the algebra workbooks for readers who want it. If it's algebra practice inside the novels you're after, the earlier books — collected in Fairy Tale Physics: Books 1–4 — are the ones built that way.

If you already own some of these

Worth reading before you buy, so nobody pays twice for the same book:

• All five paperbacks are also sold individually in this shop.
• Gravity here is the same book that appears inside Fairy Tale Physics: Books 1–4. If you own the omnibus, you own this Gravity already.
• Newton's Laws here is the 2nd edition, which is a different book from the original in the omnibus — rewritten, with the science integrated into the story rather than set behind it.
• Light and Fluid Mechanics are not in this bundle in print. Both are included as PDFs and ebooks in the digital materials. Light's only printed home is the omnibus; Fluid Mechanics is the short 2014 original of the story that became The Hopeful Queen, and is no longer printed.

Plus every digital resource I've made

Your order includes access to the Map of the Realm — a private page holding everything, with three ways in: a guided path from beginning to end where each item builds on the last, a browse-by-topic list for the unit you're teaching this week, and a browse-by-age route for ages 7-8, 9-12, and 13 and up.

On it:

• PDF and ePub versions of all seven books — the five in this bundle, plus Light: A Fairy Tale and Fluid Mechanics: A Fairy Tale
• Four interactive browser games — The Sorceress of Circuits (electricity), The Case of the Seven Reflections (optics), Scientific Notation Quest, and A Castle of Math and Motion (kinematics)
• Worksheets and answer keys — the Energy Robot, Momentum and 1-D Kinematics Quests, Free Body Diagrams, Friction Explorer and Calculating Friction, and the Flower Garden Riddles
• Archimedes' Puzzle Book, a 28-page PDF of lever and pulley puzzles with a full answer key
• The Starlight Starship workbook — the inverse square law and 3D shapes, worked through as an interstellar voyage
• Simulations — the Friction Explorer, the Doppler effect, and types of waves
• Bonus stories — Abigail's Totally Purposeful, Definitely Not Accidental or Dangerous Adventure (pendulums) and Gerald and the Many Unsettling Details (the photoelectric effect, told darkly and funnily)
• The Ostomachion printable, and the individual Physics Fables stories as separate PDFs

How you reach the map: your download is on the confirmation page the moment you check out, and your order confirmation email has a View Order and Downloads button that takes you back to your order page any time. What you download is a PDF holding your link to the map.

There are also two Algebra 1 workbooks on the map if you want them — straight math practice rather than stories, so they read quite differently from everything else. Useful if algebra is what you need, easy to skip if it isn't.

And it keeps growing — everything I make from here on gets added to the same map, and you won't pay for it again.

A note about math. No math is required to use these books, but there is some optional math available for those who would like it. You can read the stories and the explanations together, or just read and enjoy the stories, or go on to the activities and practice problems. I know some people really love the math and others have had very stressful experiences with it, and I want this to be delightful either way.

Shipping: these are print-on-demand paperbacks — please allow 2–3 weeks for printing and delivery. If you need them sooner, the books are also available individually on Amazon with faster shipping.

About the author

Sarah Allen tutored math and physics for twenty years before becoming a full-time writer. She has a physics degree from the University of Washington (graduated with college and departmental honors) and a master's in Cognition and Learning from Columbia. Her goal is to write the sort of physics books she would have wanted as a kid.

Ages 9–12 · Five paperbacks, 936 pages · PDFs and ePubs of all seven books · Four browser games · Worksheets, answer keys and workbooks · Bonus stories and simulations · Free updates as the library grows

100% Delight Guarantee: If for whatever reason it's not a good fit, email me and I'll refund you, no questions asked.