Digestion! The Musical, a madcap illustrated opus on food’s destiny for ages five and up

Upend expectations. Take what is normally expected from a thing and completely subvert it in a much more excellent manner than you are used to. Digestion! The Musical is an illustrated book that takes the normally short presentation of those books and makes it longer. It takes a subject that every elementary-aged child is curious about and turns it into a theme park of a book. There are three distinct areas of the book that looks at how the body digests food. Digestion! The Musical works as an illustrated book for young elementary ages, as well as, a primer on the human body for ages six and up. It’s also worth noting that it does this with style, STEM, humor, and poop, just in case your audiences are curious about the end results.

The stage is set from the moment that you open up Digestion! The Musical. It starts out with a variety of foods in the audience about to watch presenters on a stage. Three baby carrots come on stage and start dancing and singing around a much larger cut-out of the human digestive tract. They’re talking about the body, its muscles, and such when a little piece of candy appears at the mouth of the human model.

The body initially taunts the candy, because it doesn’t have any nutritional value. However, after some sweet talk and optimistic thoughts, the body relents and lets the candy hop on in. The carrots present an overview of what’s going to happen to our sweet friend as it enters the mouth and sees the gauntlet of red, pink, blue, and brown that awaits it.

The text in Digestion! The Musical has a rhyming style and playful nature that illustrated book fans enjoy. However, it differs from most of the others in its class by being longer and having multiple chapters, in addition to aspiring to teach ages five and up about the one thing that they all see and experience daily.

The candy’s journey comes to a quick end when it lands in a green pool of bile. Our carrots enter from stage right and let us know that they’ll remain there for about an hour, at which point the candy is introduced to blood, and a multiple-page arc of what the blood does takes center stage. But, the candy has changed, revealing a much healthier snack that was hidden underneath, a nut.

The nut is healthy. The body’s systems rejoice and apologize if it’s appropriate, restating their go-to responsibilities of which they all have one, except for the appendix. The nut is now ready for its final trip to see the porcelain bowl of joy, or doom, depending on your perspective. A series of dancing brown ovals celebrate around the edge of a toilet that’s adorned like a disco ball. There are lights bouncing off of it, toilet plungers celebrating, the toilet brush is joyously jaunting around with bathroom literature, the carrots are happy and there are streams of toilet paper coming down from the ceiling.

What those younger audiences might not be paying attention to are the STEM lessons happening in Digestion! The Musical. It’s happening as our carrots are speaking, as the candy-covered peanut makes its way south, and especially at the end of the book in its recap of key biological terms. We see another illustration of the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. Platelets, plasma, red and white blood cells, the liver, lungs, palate, pancreas and more are shown again. It’s not the first time that audiences have seen them, astute readers will recognize them from the song and dance routine that they engaged in during the book.

This seems like a lot of deep-dive content for an illustrated book, doesn’t it? It is a lot, but it’s not something that elementary ages, even those younger ages, won’t be able to handle or enjoy if the book is read to them. It takes the lesson and concept of our body’s digestive system, uses their real terms, but mixes it in with jokes, rhyming text, and big, happy illustrations. Moreover, it puts all of this on thicker-than-average pages and formats the entire package as an illustrated book that’s on the verge of being too long to read in one sitting.

The result is something that pre-k through elementary school will enjoy for entirely different reasons. Those younger kids will like it because of the bright illustrations, funny songs, rhyming text, and dancing poop. The smart older kids will like it because it gets them ahead of the class on human health, plus the funny illustrations and dancing poop. Come for the illustrations or the stem, and stay for the laughter, either way, it’s a book that those five through 11 will find simply golden and educational.

Digestion! The Musical is by Adam Rex with illustrations by Laura Park and available on Chronicle Books.

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