HAIR IN FUNNY PLACES

A child asks her teddy bear about growing up and gets an earful in this wildly irreverent look at puberty. It’s all the work of Mr. and Mrs. Hormone (and their ratlike dog), the teddy explains, who concoct “potions” that give children “bosoms,” pimples, hair in new places, radical mood swings, and ultimately the urge and ability to make babies. Depicting the Hormones as hairy monsters bearing gleefully malevolent expressions, Cole (Bad Habits!, 1999, etc.) tracks male and female physical changes in a pair of unclothed, skinny-limbed teenagers. Though many books, starting with Robie H. Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal (1994), cover the territory in less ghoulish fashion, here at least readers will get some basic information, plus the idea that certain rough patches on the road to adulthood are survivable. (Picture book/nonfiction. 10-14)