By Seymour Simon
The same trip the food takes, told for an older child and photographed for real, so they are looking at an actual stomach lining rather than a drawing of one.
Seymour Simon walks the digestive tract from the first bite to the last of it leaving, and he does it in photographs of the real thing. A tongue magnified until you can see the taste buds standing up on it. The inside of a stomach, pink and ridged. The velvet lining of the small intestine under an electron microscope, which turns out to be a forest. There is a spread per stage, a few dense paragraphs beside each picture, and no jokes anywhere. It runs thirty-two pages and it treats your child as somebody who wants the actual information about what happens to their lunch.
This is digestion for when your child has outgrown the funny version and wants it straight. Simon's whole method is that a real photograph beats an illustration, and here it pays off, because the inside of a working gut is stranger than anything an artist would draw. It is short enough that a child who won't finish a chapter book will finish this, and the pictures pull a browsing child in from any page. Worth knowing that the sentences are harder than the picture-book shape suggests: Simon writes at close to a sixth-grade level and does not soften his vocabulary, so this suits a strong eight-year-old or an ordinary eleven-year-old, and a struggling nine-year-old will look at the photographs and put it down.