Boobies - Nancy Vo - ★★★

AUTHOR: Nancy Vo

GENRE: Children's Picture Book

PUBLICATION DATE: August 30, 2022

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A cheeky little nonfiction picture book about boobies. Not the avian variety but the mammalian kind. A good introductory book on external mammary anatomy. Though I admit I wanted to read about the avian boobies.

“You have just opened a book about boobies.” 👀

From the cover, I honestly thought this book would be about the blue-footed booby! (I should have paid more attention to the placement of the two O’s! 🤭) But the book turned out to be about the other boobies – a surprise.

Some of the jokes would be lost on readers who are unaware of the bird species known as “booby.”

But this nature lover always found the bird’s name hilarious and hence I was thrilled to find a picture book about the bird. I am still unsure if I am happy or not about the unexpected direction this book went in.

The content begins with the bird but soon moves to mammalian mammary glands, covering various subtopics such as who has mammary glands, how many glands, and so on. (Of course, it always calls them “boobies”, but I’m feeling stupid typing “boobies” so many times! 😆) Basically, the book covers all things mammary for major mammals, including humans. I think the inclusion of whales would have made this properly comprehensive.

That said, the execution of the content is a bit disjointed. In the quest to be broad in scope, the book jumps from topic to topic without exploring anything in detail. The end result is hence somewhat flat. Several important points are indicated but not openly mentioned. For instance, one page contains the illustrations of breasts in various shapes and sizes, with the text indicating that breasts aren’t standard in appearance. The sketches include a hairy male chest (took me ages to figure out why those “breasts” were so hairy!) and missing breasts with mastectomy scars (a great idea, but not at all obvious to the typical reader, especially as most people don’t know what mastectomy scars actually look like.) There is also no detailing on why male and female breasts differ.

The text content per page keeps varying. Some pages have minimal lines while others go a bit scientific in their explanation. The language is mostly age-appropriate (except for the tougher anatomical terms), aiming at kids in the 8+ age range who might just have started discovering changes in their bodies. The content is witty and educational.

The illustrations are good, but not to my artistic taste. The blurb describes the style as “stencil art in retro palette”, so I guess I am not a fan of retro colours. The sketches ranged from realistic (like the beautiful graphic of a Black woman nursing her baby) to somewhat abstract (like the above-mentioned page full of boobs in multiple colours that aren’t always in skin tone.)

Overall, this is an udderly informative book, though I am unsure about whom to recommend it to, considering the muddled execution. It might work as a good starting point for middle-graders on this part of mammalian anatomy.

3 stars.

This was a library read, picked up only because of my fondness for boobies… of the avian kind. Here are two beautiful boobies for you!

Pic courtesy: World Wildlife Fund.

Fun fact: The blue feet of the blue-footed booby comes from its diet of fresh fish. The more brighter the blue, the healthier the bird.