By Steve Jenkins
Steve Jenkins lays your bones out at life size next to a bat's, a python's and an elephant's, and lets the sizes do the talking.
Steve Jenkins takes the two hundred and six bones you're made of and puts them beside everybody else's. A human hand next to a fruit bat's hand, same bones, wildly different shape. Your leg bone next to an elephant's, which weighs as much as a small child, and a stork's, which weighs almost nothing. A python's ribs, all three hundred pairs of them. Much of it is printed at actual size, and there are fold-out pages that open into something enormous, so your child can lay their own arm on the page and match it up. The text is short and sits beside the cut-paper collages rather than crowding them.
This is the awe end of the body obsession rather than the gross end. Jenkins never explains a bone in a paragraph when he can show it to you at life size instead, so a child who bounces off blocks of text will sit with this for a long time. And the comparisons do the teaching without saying so: after eight spreads of the same bones showing up in a bat, a monkey and a stork, your child works out for themselves that a skeleton is one idea rebuilt over and over. There's a good chunk of proper bone science in the back for when they want more.