So You Want To Be An Explorer: A Kids' Guide to Exploration, Adventure, World Geography, and the Daring Travelers Who Discover New Places and Cultures - Hardcover

FINALIST - 2026 Literary Global Children's Book Awards (Adventure Category)

From the So You Want To Be A... Series - 2026 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards, Grand Prize Winner

Somewhere beyond the edge of every map are places no human has ever seen, and the next explorer to find them might be a kid reading this book right now.

So You Want To Be An Explorer is a guide for young adventurers ages 10 to 14 who feel the pull of the unknown. This isn't a fairy tale about treasure maps and pirate ships. It's an illustrated look at what explorers do: the years of scientific training, the physical preparation, the survival skills, and the mental toughness required to venture into environments never designed for human beings. From deep ocean trenches to polar ice fields, from uncharted jungles to the edges of our solar system, this book takes kids inside the full range of modern exploration and the careers it offers.

What does an explorer's daily life look like? How do expedition teams of scientists, navigators, survival specialists, and local guides prepare for months of fieldwork in remote places? How do explorers document their findings so that what they see becomes part of the permanent human record? And what does it feel like to stand somewhere no person has ever stood? These are the questions kids are asking, and this book answers them.

Inside, readers will learn how explorers master geography, navigation, and survival science before a single expedition departs. They'll see the physical and psychological demands of operating in extreme environments, and how explorers prepare body and mind to meet them. They'll meet remarkable figures from the history of exploration whose daring expanded the boundaries of what humanity knows about its own planet.

This is a book that doesn't simplify the hard parts. It weighs the fun of discovery against the responsibility that comes with it, and the deep reward of contributing something new to human knowledge. Every page is illustrated with care, making the science, the geography, and the adventure stick.

There are still questions no one has answered and places no one has reached. The next explorer to change what we know about this world is growing up right now.