Childhood is about looking for answers to the kinds of perplexing questions that arise with each day and new experience, and the biggest question marks get planted all over that item kids carry around with them at all times: their bodies. Even infants probe and prod themselves, trying to determine the purpose (and maximum fun factor) of every little nook and cranny. As they get older, children substitute words for fingers, but the questioning never ends – indeed, as the dreaded storm that is puberty approaches, the need for answers only intensifies.

Tundra’s new Body Works series isn’t on the level (in either frankness or age-appropriateness) of Peter Mayle’s 1973 classic What’s Happening to Me? and its companion volumes. Rather, they are a quartet of breezy books pitched at children who don’t have to worry about rogue body hair, urges, or emissions just yet, but who are nonetheless ready to find out about hair, skin, sweat, and sneezes. Written by Toronto’s Liza Fromer (the former co-host of CityTV’s Breakfast Television), in collaboration with Dr. Francine Gerstein (Fromer’s sister-in-law), the books keep things simple, straightforward, and almost entirely squirm-free.

The books are models of restraint. This should please parents, though it will disappoint many young readers, for whom a spoonful of boogers helps the medicine go down. In the end, the aim of the books is to inform, not entertain.

My Achy Body tackles injuries in their most common kid-related forms, briefly explaining the concept of pain before moving on to bruises, scrapes, scabs, stomach aches, and the like. As in the other three books, each painful topic is given a clear and jargon-free explanation (medical terms like “abrasion” or “abdominal pain” are kept in parentheses; additional terms are defined in end-of-book glossaries). Fun facts are offered, as are true-or-false questions and health tips.

My Messy Body offers the highest gross-out factor of the four books, tackling everything from “tears to sweat, earwax to snot, pee to poo, and […] vomit to pus,” though even those topics are handled with a high level of civility. Similarly, My Noisy Body, covering farts and burps (alongside less potentially colourful topics such as coughs and stomach growls), never lays on the ick.

All four books are fairly direct in their approach, though My Stretchy Body, which covers growth, may require the most mental dexterity on the part of young readers trying to understand how the many topics tie in with the overarching subject. This may be because the subject requires an understanding of elapsed time, which, as most parents are aware, is a concept children have a wee bit of trouble with.

Illustrator Joe Weissmann (Can Hens Give Milk?) provides pencil-and-watercolour images that exhibit the same decorum as the text. (The creeping-cloud farts and critter-filled scabs and sneezes are relatively mild.) The young characters who demonstrate the various concepts are culturally diverse, though subtly so. The layout is clean and uncluttered, with lots of white space.

You couldn’t really ask for a more straightforward and snicker-free handling of body-related topics. These books would work very well in a classroom or as a health primer, though that same approach means they are unlikely to become favourites for kids drawn to the wilder, woolier side of their own bodies.