Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Non-fiction book review - A Garden in Your Belly

 A Garden in Your Belly by Masha D'Yans

 The microbiome fascinates me. Not just because it's this whole world inside of your body but because it is vital to good health. We have this idea that the body does its thing all on its own but that simply is not true. We can't digest without the microbiome. Microscopic life protects and cleans our skin. It's amazing. Its also complex and we can't fully understand it. That makes it a tough subject for a kids book. How do you ex.plain something to kids when we don't fully understand it? D'yans has handled it correctly, making it very representative and artistic. Not a lot of hard facts, more fact based statements. By starting us with the image of a garden and the various life forms in it, the way they work together for the health of the garden on the whole we have a vague structure to consider the microbiome. We don't get into the hows, just the whats. It aids in digestion. We need it. Everyone's is different. It gets started when we are born, a gift from our mother, but is changed by our environment and experiences. With highly artistic illustrations, this book occupies a strange place between non-fiction and a picture book, but it's a solid way to start understanding a complicated idea. 

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley

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