Sick!, an eye-catching, appropriate name for a gateway STEM graphic novel

If elementary school-age students latched onto the disgusting elements of science I’m convinced that more people would follow the STEM path. I also fully believe that in 2034, many actively working scientists will cite Phineas and Ferb as a main influence. Sick! The Twists and Turns Behind Animal Germs is a STEM book that’s disgusting in all of the right ways.

The moment that you open Sick! to its table of contents you’ll get a firm handle on the audience it’s going for. The chapters are listed with some anthropomorphic germs and a couple of the animals that are highlighted in the book. The animals are playfully taunting the viruses. Those who prefer to read what to expect just need to turn the page where they’ll dig into the warning that tells them that this is a messy science book, will ask more questions than it answers and isn’t meant to be an encyclopedia. If illustrations are more your scene just turn the page and you’ll see drawings of a person on the toilet, someone throwing up and mucus dribbling out of someone’s nose. Science has the capacity to be very disgusting, doesn’t it?

That’s where the book grabs your attention, but it then allows its science to drive home the point, as well as the hard work that goes into it. Each one of its eight chapters concentrates on a problem that a wild animals have; like a chimpanzee who ate a very bitter plant to self-medicate its stomach ache, to a scientist who was collecting DNA samples from vulture’s stomachs.

In the latter, they were doing that to determine why vultures never get sick, despite eating the carcasses of anything dead in the road. They have acid in their stomach, just a xenomorph, don’t they? No, they don’t, it’s actually just a witches brew of bacteria that lives on their faces, but not in their stomachs. A tricky bacteria called clostridia also impacts how vultures can have a diet that’s akin to a billy goat and not spend half of the time on the toilet.

Sick! reads like a very smart graphic novel with individual chapter narratives. There is an underlying theme, and that’s the small, unseen germs that do have beneficial aspects to those critters around us; but could be lethal to others or those that try to mimic their adaptations. Learning about bacteria is certainly on the deeper end of the STEM pool and this book is aimed at upper elementary ages and up. The content is going to be on level for those older audiences, but the presentation makes it such that it’s not too intimidating for those younger readers.

For the most part it manages this demographic trick by combining lots of illustrations, glossy paper and a playful, conversational tone in its text. I say “for the most part” because some of the older readers might tune out when they encounter the alliterations that are used for various animals, like Victor Vulture or Adam Alligator. Initially, this bugged me as it seemed a little juvenile, but then I remembered about the book’s audience, who probably won’t mind. Those younger readers will laugh at the names and those older readers will roll their eyes, and think that they don’t need basic tricks to keep them entertained or to master the book’s content fully.

After a couple of minutes, they’ll be humorously thinking about Bailey Bat, how they very rarely get Cancer and learning about NLRP3; a protein that exists in all mammals, but to a much lower degree in the Australian Black Flying Fox. Sick! is science in action that tells the story of some patient scientists who studied hard to pin down creatures, and figured how they live or thrive, despite variables that might insinuate otherwise. Its funny graphics will attract those who would otherwise avoid science and the text will prove to them that just because it’s STEM doesn’t make it boring or confusing.

Sick! The Twists and Turns Behind Animal Germs is by Heather L. Montgomery with illustrations by Lindsey Leigh and is available on Bloomsbury Children’s Books.

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