The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers: A Tour of Your Useless Parts, Flaws, and Other Weird Bits

The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers: A Tour of Your Useless Parts, Flaws, and Other Weird Bits is quirky, zany, informative, and thoroughly engaging. Author Rachel Poliquin and illustrator Clayton Hanmer have created a truly funny age-appropriate science book on evolution that young readers will read and share repeatedly. There is no better reason for adding a book to your library collection than that.

Narrated by a Wisdom Tooth, with the somewhat unreliable assistance of an enthusiastic but Disappearing Kidney, The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers: A Tour of Your Useless Parts, Flaws, and Other Weird Bits presents the Table of Contents as a museum map. Readers move from ‘room’ to ‘room’ as they proceed through the “story of how you became a human”, (p. 7)

There are 17 Museum Rooms (aka Chapters), including “Wisdom Teeth”, “Goosebumps”, “Monkey Muscles”, “Survivor Hairs”, and “The Disappearing Kidney”, plus a Glossary, Further Reading, Index, and Bios of the author and illustrator.

Rachel Poliquin’s text explains the on-going nature of evolution by linking vestigial body parts, such as tail stumps, hiccups, and wisdom teeth, to environmental changes in the past.

Perhaps your relatives’ lifestyle changed somehow — they began eating new food, for example, or moved to a different habitat. (p. 7)

Clayton Hanmer’s art is more than the icing on the cake for this entertaining STEM book. Key concepts are highlighted throughout with visual humour that will enhance learning. For example, the colourful cartoon-style museum tour includes our guides Wisdom Tooth and Disappearing Kidney munching popcorn and sipping pop as they complain about the slow pace of a movie on natural selection. Best of all, young readers will be so engaged by the art, they won’t even notice how much they are learning.

The Museum of Odd Body Leftovers: A Tour of Your Useless Parts, Flaws, and Other Weird Bits is a book where you and young readers can judge the book by its cover. Both the title and the cover illustration ensure that you won’t have to ‘sell’ this book. Put it on display, and it will be borrowed immediately.