The Woman Who Couldn’t Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness by Quinn Eastman (Colummbia University Press, August 2023) is a medical examination of figuring out the rare condition of idiopathic hypersomia (IH), including the history of the diagnosis and the pharmacological treatment the condition. As the title suggests, it begins with the story of

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When my daughter (now 10) first got a tablet to use for various educational and entertainment purposes, she soon found the Wow in the World podcast by Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz. She loves the zany personalities of these voices and the podcast filled her random-but-educational science facts cravings. The book What in the Wow!?

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In the poetic picture book When You Breathe by Diana Farid, illustrated by Billy Renkl (Cameron + Company, 2020), the author, a physician, describes the connections between the wind and air around us and the breath that sustains our lives. Beginning with a breath that “fills the upside tree” in our lungs, Farid continues the

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In Nothing is Little by Carmella Van Vleet (Holiday House, 2022), middle schooler Felix begins to come to terms with himself, his place in his family, and his identity as a person. His story is driven by his own search for the identity of his absent father, with “detective work” he hides from his mother

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Breaking Through the Clouds: The Sometimes Turbulent Life of Meteorologist Joanne Simpson by Sandra Nickel, illustrated by Helena Perez Garcia (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2022) teaches readers about an unknown young woman who went into a unique STEM field in the mid-1900s, this time the study of meteorology. Her interest in clouds began even

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Build, Beaver, Build by Sandra Markle is a book about beavers at the largest beaver dam in the world. Sandra Markle is a name that I’ve come across many times in my years of reading children’s fiction. I have reviewed two of her scientific mystery books on this site: The Case of the Vanishing Little

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