LICE

Life is tough for head lice, but as this thorough and sympathetic primer shows, they’re superbly adapted to face the challenges.

Though the images generally consist of isolated line images or silhouettes with muted orange highlights, they’re nevertheless large and clinically detailed—and sure to induce a mix of horror and fascination in human readers, even those with unsullied scalps. Addressing the ectoparasites themselves—“Your survival depends on your wits, your skills, and a pinch of good luck”—Páramo begins with an expansive gallery of lice cousins. She then explains how to choose suitable human hosts, describes salient anatomical features as well as feeding and mating habits, delivers warnings about hazards from multiple specific insecticides to lice combs, and finishes with a sprinkle of facts about human-lice relations through history and prehistory. “Good luck and happy infesting!” she concludes. The specific, no-nonsense information she delivers may help transform these tiny horrors into better-known and therefore more manageable ones for anxious children and parents. So will the occasionally giddy tone of the text, translated from Spanish. “You can’t fly,” the unseen narrator announces in large boldface text next to a fanciful image of a caped specimen. “You don’t even have wings. Superlouse ain’t a thing.”

Required reading for lice or anyone likely to harbor them.