Are these images from an alien planet? Monsters from the Late Late Show? No, they're your own body parts--hair, skin, taste buds, blood, teeth and eyeballs, magnified thousands of times. Similar to the book Yuck!: A Big Book of Little Horrors by Robert Snedden (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Yikes! turns microphotography into a gross-out guessing game, using fold-out pages to reveal the true identity of these gruesome-looking micro-organisms. (Ages 6-14)

Yikes! provides readers with a closer-than-close look at their own bodies. The book focuses on various areas of the body -- both external (hair, skin, or the tongue) and internal (blood, bones, and the stomach) -- and explores them in greater detail than you ever thought possible. Each spread starts with an image or two of something that looks like either the surface of an alien planet, or a creature that lives there. A text blurb drops hints as to what the image is, and invites readers to open a gatefold to discover more photos and a detailed explanation of which body part the gross pictures really show.

As in the companion book, Yuck!, Yikes! ends with a group of particularly funky photos, and is topped off with a quiz testing readers' image-deciphering abilities. An ideal marriage of the "gross" phenomenon and a science lesson, Yikes! will keep kids intrigued and itchy for hours.