Inside Me

What are you made of?

It is one of the first big questions a child asks. Inside Me: What I'm Made Of is a first science book about cells, and it answers that question honestly, in words a two-year-old can follow. Look at your hand. Look closer, closer than your eyes can see, and there they are: trillions of tiny cells, and every one of them is part of you.

Page by page, a child zooms in through their own skin and finds that cells come in different shapes. Long like ropes in the muscles, branching like trees in the brain, round like little disks in the blood. Then the book goes inside a single cell, to the nucleus, to the tiny instruction book folded up small. It unwraps into chromosomes, then into DNA, and arrives at the heart of the story: half of that instruction book came from each of your parents. It is why your eyes, your hair, and your smile look the way they do.

This is real cell biology, told as a story rather than a list of facts, and it takes little ones seriously. A magnifying glass carries the reading in and back out again, ending where it began: your own hand, with a whole world inside it.

What's inside:

• A first look at cells, the human body, and DNA for curious children ages 2 to 5
• Real cell biology, accurate to the science, told as one read-aloud story
• Soft, hand-illustrated art in a warm pastel palette
• A first conversation about where you came from and what makes you you

Written and illustrated by Leah Bury, a PhD cell biologist and science illustrator, who made this book to show her own children the science of the world inside them.

Inside Me is a first science series for toddlers, looking closer at the body one book at a time. This is Book 1.