Your Breathtaking Lungs and Rocking Respiratory System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2209-0 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2195-6 (RLB). Subject Headings: Respiratory organs-Juvenile literature. Lungs-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4
	Your Growing Body and Remarkable Reproductive System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2210-6 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2196-3 (RLB). Subject Headings: Generative organs-Juvenile literature. Human growth-Juvenile literature. Puberty-Juvenile literature. Developmental biology-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4
	Your Growling Guts and Dynamic Digestive System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2211-3 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2197-0 (RLB). Subject Heading: Digestive organs-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4
	Your Hardworking Heart and Spectacular Circulatory System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2224-3 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2198-7 (RLB). Subject Headings: Cardiovascular system-Juvenile literature. Heart-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4
	Your Mind-Bending Brain and Networking Nervous System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2225-0 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2299-4 (RLB). Subject Headings: Nervous system-Juvenile literature. Brain-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4
	Your Strong Skeleton and Amazing Muscular System. (Your Brilliant Body!). Paul Mason. St. Catharines, ON: Crabtree, 2015. 32 pp., pbk. & hc., $8.95 (pbk.), $21.56 (RLB). ISBN 978-0-7787-2226-7 (pbk.), ISBN 978-0-7787-2208-3 (RLB). Subject Headings: Musculoskeletal system-Juvenile literature. Bones-Juvenile literature. Muscles-Juvenile literature. Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up. Review by Barbara McMillan. ***½ /4

excerpts:

Amazing alveoli. At the end of the tiniest bronchioles in each lung are the alveoli. You have about 600 million alveoli altogether! That's so many in total that if they were all spread out on the ground, you could easily cover a tennis court with them. Wrapped around each alveolus are tiny blood vessels called capillaries. These are so tiny that blood cells have to pass through them one at a time. Between the alveolus and the capillary is a membrane just one cell thick. This is so thin that 50 of them on top of one another would be as thick as tissue paper. (From Your Breathtaking Lungs and Rocking Respiratory System, p. 10.)

STRANGE BUT TRUE. Babies grow really quickly! In fact, it is a good thing they eventually slow down. If an average-sized baby kept on growing at the same rate it does in its first year, it would be 25 feet (7.6 m) tall and weight nearly 308 pounds (140 kg) by the time it was 20 years old! (From Your Growing Body and Remarkable Reproductive System, p. 16.)

DID YOU KNOW? Drinking fruit juice and brushing your teeth don't mix. You should avoid drinking fruit juice if you are about to brush your teeth. The citric acid in fruit juice weakens you teeth's protective coating for about half an hour. If you brush your teeth in that time, you will be brushing away the teeth's protection! (From Your Growling Guts and Dynamic Digestive System, p. 29.)

See for yourself. In normal use, a healthy heart NEVER gets tired – despite beating roughly once every second of your life. Try squeezing a tennis ball once a second for a minute or two and your will start to see how amazing this is! (From Your Hardworking Heart and Spectacular Circulatory System, p. 5.)

BRILLIANT BODY FACT. Your brain can live for four to six minutes without oxygen, After that, parts of it begin to die. (From Your Mind-Bending Brain and Networking Nervous System, p. 28.)

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! Major Zamora was a well-known contortionist in the United States during the early 1900s. Zamora was only 2'8" ( 81 cm) tall, and weighed just 53 pounds (24 kg), but he was also incredibly flexible. He could get through tiny holes – his most famous trick was squeezing himself into a large bottle, then climbing out again. (From Your Strong Skeleton and Amazing Muscular System, p. 13.)

Atlantic Canada, Ontario, three of the four western provinces, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories include the study of the human body in Grade 5 science. Students at this grade level learn about the major components of the digestive system, the skeletal and muscular systems, the nervous system, the integumentary system, and the respiratory and circulatory systems. They also begin to understand how these systems work together to maintain a healthy body. Moreover, it is in Grade 5 or Grade 6 that students in health classes learn about the reproductive system. The six books in Crabtree's "Your Brilliant Body!" series align perfectly with these instructional goals, and they do so in a way that is not only informative but fascinating and, in places, amazing. It's impossible to read about the complexity of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, for example, without wondering how all of the processes involved work so well without us ever having to consciously think about them. Hooray for the brain stem, the human body's "autopilot," that regulates heartbeat, circulation, respiration, and other seemingly automatic processes for us (Your Mind-Bending Brain and Networking Nervous System, pp. 14 & 15).

      Paul Mason, the author of the series, knows how to intellectually engage readers without all of the bells and whistles that seem to accompany numerous nonfiction books for youth. He does so by asking and answering questions and presenting historical and contemporary information in interesting ways that include the variety of excerpts quoted above (e.g., Brilliant Body Fact, Don't Try This At Home!, Did You Know?, Strange But True!," and See for yourself). It's important to realize that the use of each type of presentation differs from book to book. While each two-page spread includes a Brilliant Body Fact near the heading, there are generally fewer occurrences of Don't Try This At Home! and See for yourself than Did You Know? and Strange But True. As one example, Your Growing Body and Remarkable Reproductive System contains 13 Brilliant Body Fact[s], 16 Strange But True! text boxes, 12 Did You Know? entries, 2 Don't Try This At Home items, and, not surprisingly, no See for yourself activity that links to the content presented.

      Regardless of the book, each of these ways of presenting information is recognizable by its design. If you are interested in activities, look for the eyeball with the blue-coloured iris. Every Brilliant Body Fact is printed on a circular, white certificate seal. Did You Know? is always found on what appears to be a splat of coloured paint. A red stop sign with a white hand, rather that the word "STOP", indicates Don't Try This At Home, and Strange But True! is printed on what looks like a green double convex lens at the top of a text-filled red rectangle that may also contain some sort of graphic or stock photograph.

      Unnamed designers employed by Rocket Design (East Anglia) Ltd. in the United Kingdom are responsible for the layout and appearance of the series. The table of contents on page 3 identifies the heading for each two-page spread that begins on pages 4 and 5 and ends on pages 28 and 29. To the right of this table is a series of diagrams and text boxes on green graph paper that show and describe the progression from cells to tissue to organ to groups of organs that make up the system described on the subsequent pages. A two-line heading for each two page spread is located at the top of the page on the left and overlaps a white text box with information introducing the content. For example, on page 4 of Your Growling Guts and Dynamic Digestive System, the heading is "Your Growling Guts" and the introduction is "Did you know that you are basically hollow? There's a tube running RIGHT THROUGH your body! It starts in your mouth and finishes at your bottom. The tube is your digestive system. Foods and drinks go in one end, and something much less pleasant comes out the other." This is followed by three questions, "Is it really just a tube?", What is a digestive system for?", and "How does it work?", and answers to these questions. Supplementing these answers are the following:

• a "Brilliant Body Fact" that states, "In your lifetime your stomach digests nearly 100,000 meals!"
• a "Strange But True!" text box with a stock photo of a rhinoceros and text that claims, "An average person from a wealthy country eats roughly 110,231 pounds (50 tons) of food (that's 24 adult white rhinos) during his or her lifetime. He or she also drinks about 13,208 gallons (50,000 L) of fluid."
• a stock photo of the face of a girl who is eating an orange slice with the note, "Digestion begins in your mouth, when you chew food."
• a "Did You Know?" text that is focussed on the size of the stomach ("...around the size of a fist...") that stretches depending upon what one eats.
• a coloured "Look Closer" diagram with labels of the human digestive system from the mouth to the rectum and anus.
• a "See for yourself" text box, on what looks like a sheet of unlined paper, that contains directions for determining "How much a stomach can hold?" using a 2L bottle, a tablespoon, and water.

      The final three pages of each book contain an appropriately named glossary (e.g., "Hearty Words!" and "Brainy Words!"), a short list of books, two websites, and three museums and/or science centers in the United States where additional information can be found, and an index.

      Highly recommended for parents of children 10 and 11 years of age, Grades 5 and 6 teachers of science and/or health, and school and public libraries.

Highly Recommended.

Barbara McMillan is a teacher educator and a professor of science education in the Faculty of Education, the University of Manitoba.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

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