Book Summary: Semenars by Mattias Kronstrand
A funny, thought-provoking and silly book – all in a flurry. Semenars is a book of 50 comic strips about life in the small world – or maybe it is the big one.
The comic strip Semenars has been published in Swedish magazines, as well as in the English magazine the Daily Squib.
Book Review: Semenars by Mattias Kronstrand
The cover featured a pencil drawing what I assumed was a tadpole on the cover. But, but, wait . . . It’s is NOT a tadpole. It is indeed a sperm, a picture book about a sperm and life full of possibilities. And that’s how I understood how perfect the title of the book is!!
Through 50 or so comic strips, Mattias Kronstrand tells a story of a tiny sperm living inside a man. It has a big event coming up to complete a race against a bunch of other fellow sperms. It beats all of his fellow racers and claims the glory of getting to the prize first amongst the many other sperms.
Using pictures, Mattias tells a story that embodies light-hearted humor on a rather hard to talk about subject. In doing so, he creates a sperm that is relatable. The pictures that are drawn are sweet and cute- child like. Mattias puts sperms in a race and make them compete with each other and winner of the race will get a life.
Told in brightly colored background and hand-drawn whimsical illustration, Semenars by Mattias Kronstrand is an absolutely worthwhile book to add in your picture book collection. The wonderfully inclusive language works to pare the explanation down to the essentials of how babies born and life begins: the combination of an egg and a sperm, which then grows into a baby.
The book also contains a great mixture of scientific explanation and beautiful celebration of creating life with funny dialogues between sperms. This allows for a much easier understanding of these scientific concepts and extends the possible readership to a much younger age.
This is a much more scientific breakdown of how an embryo comes to exist and possibly become a baby. The focus is on what happens when DNA from two people comes together, but the book doesn’t get into the ways that might happen.
The strength of this book was that it made the topic into a funny narrative and gave it that kind of logic. So the book does something unique beyond the information you could just get from Wikipedia.
Overall, Semenars by Mattias Kronstrand is an excellent introduction for even the youngest “readers,” and one that should be comfortable for even fairly squeamish parents to use.
