Amazing You: Getting Smart About Your Private Parts by Gail Saltz, Lynne Avril Cravath (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

“Mom, where do babies come from?”Many parents live in fear of the day their child asks that question—which inevitably happens, often as early as the preschool years. Here is a picture book designed especially for young children who are becoming sexually aware but aren't ready to learn about sexual intercourse. Written with warmth and honesty, Amazing You! presents clear and age-appropriate information about reproduction, birth, and the difference between girls' and boys' bodies. Lynne Cravath's whimsical illustrations enliven the text, making this a book that parents will gladly share with their young ones.

Author Bio: Dr. Gail Saltz is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York–Presbyterian Hospital and a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, and CBS News, and is a mental-health contributor to the Today show. She has also written a book for adults, Becoming Real: Defeating the Stories We Tell Ourselves That Hold Us Back. She lives in New York City.

Publishers Weekly

Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts by Dr. Gail Saltz, illus. by Lynne Cravath, begins with a note to parents, then asks young readers to "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see?" Beginning with "Head, arms, hand, legs, and feet," the narrative then progresses to "private parts," calling them by their nicknames and then getting serious about the function of the uterus and penis-tactfully skirting details about intercourse ("When a man and a woman love each other and decide that they want to make a baby, a man's sperm joins with a woman's egg"). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1-This title tackles basic body awareness and sex education. The text speaks directly to young children, differentiating between body parts that are visible most of the time and those that are kept hidden, showing the differences between girls and boys and offering a simple explanation of how babies are made without explicit reference to sex. Cravath's sunny cartoons show the various parts in a straightforward manner, though preschoolers may be confused about where the internal ones are. The text also uses terms such as "vagina" and "urinate" without actually explaining what they mean, and, curiously, the text does not discuss breasts at all, though there are side-by-side illustrations of a boy and girl in the baby, preschool, and adult stages. An author's note advises parents on the finer points of discussing these delicate issues. Though Laurie Krasny Brown's What's the Big Secret?: Talking about Sex with Girls and Boys (Little, Brown, 1997) remains the gold standard for sex ed for young children, this book is a friendly supplement or a nice starter for parents who aren't quite ready to go into the detail provided in Brown's book.-Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Maryland School for the Deaf, Columbia Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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