Marg Meikle provides answers to questions kids wonder about, posed to her via post and e-mails or arising from her own enquiring mind. The results of her research range from the mildly interesting (why isn’t there a Q on the phone keypad?) to the wildly fascinating (are bats really blind, and can they fly in the rain?). In between, she covers an eclectic span of knowledge. She delves into the origins of the peace sign and reveals that on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, Thanksgiving is a moveable feast whose date has shifted many times. She provides us with the Scoville incendiary scale for hot peppers and lists all legal two-letter words for Scrabble. Some questions feel a little tired (was there ever cocaine in Coca-Cola?), others odd (can you make a disco ball out of unwanted CDs?). An area of abiding human interest is the scatological, and Meikle gives that its due (with questions such as: what’s a poop deck? why are beans called musical fruit? and can constipation kill you?). The text is enlivened with Tina Holdcroft’s cartoons and with jokes, every one a groaner (what do you call a sleeping bull? a bulldozer!).

This is the third kids’ book by Meikle, a Vancouverite and former CBC Radio columnist known as The Answer Lady. She follows the tried-and-true formula that won Silver Birch and Red Cedar awards for Funny You Should Ask. Meikle thanks librarians as well as Tim Berners-Lees, inventor of the World Wide Web, yet doesn’t otherwise reveal her sources. Kids, however, might be interested in knowing how to set out on the answer trail, too.