The Best How Things Work Books for Kids

Sooner or later every child asks a question with no polite short answer. Where does it go when you flush? How does the crane lift the thing that lifts the thing? Who decided gum should be pink? Curiosity about mechanism shows up early and it is stubbornly physical — children want the lid off, the cover open, the wall sliced away so they can see the pipes. The books worth keeping are the ones that oblige. They draw the cross-section, label the parts, follow the pipe all the way to the treatment plant, and trace the finished object back to the raw material, on the cheerful assumption that a seven-year-old can handle the real answer if somebody bothers to draw it properly.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of 172 books about how things work and how they get made, our editors chose twelve that come at the subject from several directions: David Macaulay’s cutaway masterworks, a steam locomotive explained at full volume, the accidental origins of bubble gum and the Super Soaker, cross-sections of working boats and of the ground beneath a city street, and one board book that gets a two-year-old thinking about what holds a house up. Start with the shortlist, then browse board books for first machines, picture books for invention and process stories, or independent-reader books for the full cutaway treatment.