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http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v65/i12/p51_s1?bypassSSO=1

"The Transition School at the University of Washington each year offers courses to as many as 16 talented middle school students to prepare them for direct entry into university classes. Among those offerings is a one-year, algebra-based, introductory physics course that was taught by Ernest Henley and the late J. Gregory Dash. The contents of that course now appear as a short textbook, Physics Around Us: How and Why Things Work."

The reviewer pans the book for having too many errors and recommends instead the OpenStax College Physics book http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/college-physics .

The Transition School is described at https://depts.washington.edu/cscy/programs/early-entrance-program/transition-school/ .

Only tangentially related, but I know that several of us have recently had experience (good-bad-ugly) with various AP/Honors algebra-based physics textbooks.

Gianocoli

and

Hewitt

are the tried-and-true offerings there, but they often leave students (and parents) feeling like Goldilocks on a bad afternoon. The former is so example-heavy and equation-driven that it lacks any ability to offer students a reasonably firm conceptual framework to act as a scaffold for all the algebra and formulae. Obviously, for top-down learners, that is anathema.

Unfortunately, Hewitt suffers from the opposite problem-- too much fun conceptual explanation, and WAYYYYY too little math.

Our solution (my DD is taking AP Physics B right now) has been to use BOTH textbooks in tandem, but it's a little unweildy since they don't synch perfectly all the time, and the coverage is slightly different. DD really enjoys Hewitt's writing style, though, for whatever that's worth. (Giancoli often reads as though it was written by Daleks. Angry Daleks.)

Maybe the Openstax offering will turn out to be the "just right" baby bear offering among algebra-based physics texts. (I can hope, anyway!) Thanks for the link, Bostonian.

The Wall Street Journal has a very positive review of

"The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics" (2013)
by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky

based on material for a Stanford continuing education course taught by Susskind, who has many physics videos on YouTube.

Quote

In this neat little book the authors aim to provide the minimum amount of knowledge you need about classical physics (that is, everything except quantum mechanics) to gain some real understanding of the world or to proceed to "the next level," which would be freshman physics. They do so with great success, and in the process they pull the rug out from under the all too common attitude that, while a physicist who doesn't appreciate art is a philistine, an artist who doesn't appreciate physics is only doing what comes naturally.

...

Which brings me to the audience for the book. The book most definitely hits the spot for the kind of mature, committed "nonacademic" that the authors have in mind. Equally, it is certainly not for the dilettante science-watcher happy with the kind of "pop science" accounts that deal as far as possible in words and images without worrying about the equations�not that I am knocking such books; I write them myself. But it is also just the right book for a much younger audience than the mature people with careers behind them who filled the classes at Stanford. It is spot-on for any young student of science to read before heading off to college to study physics seriously, and I shall certainly be recommending it in that connection. "The Theoretical Minimum" should also be required reading for our politicians and lawmakers�but that is probably hoping for too much.

Other science books recommended by the reviewer, John Gribbin, are

"Six Easy Pieces"
by Richard Feynman

"The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications" (1998)
by David Deutsch

"The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination" (1998)
by Jacob Bronowski

"Mr. Tompkins in Paperback" (1965)
by George Gamow

A pretty good book that fits between Hewitt and Giancoli is Holt Physics by Serway and Faghn - it has lots more math than Hewitt, but is more user friendly that Giancoli.