The Mushroom Fan Club by Elise Gravel, 56 pp, RL 2

-
The Mushroom Fan Club is Elise Gravel's love letter to fungi (and her family's favorite pastime) in the form of a field guide. This marks the sixth book by Gravel I have reviewed in two years and I am a lifelong fan. Gravel is the author and illustrator of amazing picture books like The Cranky Ballerina, middle grade novel series like Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere and graphic novel biographies like The Great Antonio. Her non-fiction, If Found . . . Please Return To Elise Gravel is a magnificent look into the creative, curious mind of an artist as well as encouragement and inspiration for kids and adults to not be shy and create.
Gravel begins The Mushroom Fan Club, "You know what I love? Walking in the woods and looking for mushrooms with my kids. It's like a treasure hint that nature organized just for us!" Gravel loves exploring nature and she also has a flair for anthropomorphizing everything. Her enthusiasm for fungi jumps off the page and she definitely makes them engaging by giving them eyes and mouths. 
Inviting readers to come for a walk with Gravel and her mushroom treasure huntering, she writes, "I'll introduce you to some of my mushroom buddies. But first, I'd like you to follow these two rules: 1) Protect their environment and 2) DON'T EAT THEM! Many Mushrooms are poisonous. Only grown-up mycologists know for certain which ones are safe to eat." With that, she goes on to detail many mushrooms, stinky and strange, beautiful and delicious. There are even the very fun to stomp on specimen, the puffball, accompanied by a very fun illustration of Gravel's daughter stomping away on a patch of puffballs. 

While I am pretty sure I would never pick up a mushroom field guide for adults to flip through, Gravel's The Mushroom Fan Club is instantly engaging and highly readable. I learned fascinating facts about something I will probably never get the chance to see in nature or on my plate, but am now inspired to seek out! Gravel wraps up her book with "Mushroom Facts" (the super mushroom from Mario is the poisonous fly agaric), "Things that happened to me while hunting," (came face to face with a porcupine AND walking into a wasp's nest) and instructions on how to make a "Spore Print."


 Source: Review Copy



Popular posts from this blog

Fox + Chick: The Sleepover and Other Stories by Sergio Ruzzier

-
Image
Fox + Chick : The Sleepover and Other Stories  by Sergio Ruzzier Review Copy from Chronicle Books Friends. Opposites. Inhabitants of a pastel-hued, water color world that is vaguely surreal, Fox and Chick are back for a third installment of their inviting, if curious, easy-to-read stories. In "The Sleepover," "The Hammer," and "The Surprise," Chick's odd logic is once again upending Fox's life. Happily, Fox responds with patience and even wisdom at times. To these unforgettable characters and luminous illustrations, Ruzzier brings a sublime simplicity that makes this series perfect for emerging readers, adding books with character and intelligence to the often dull world of beginning reader books. If you aren't familiar with this delightful duo, definitely check out my reviews of the first two books (links below) where I put the greatness of Ruzzier's work into historical ( Frog & Toad ) context. Then check out ALL of Ruzzier's p
Read more

Be a Tree! by Maria Gianferrari illustrated by Felicita Sala

-
Image
Be a Tree! by Maria Gianferrari illustrated by Felicita Sala Review Copy from Abrams Kids I picture-walked Be a Tree! three times before I actually read the words. Felicita Sala's illustrations for Maria Gianferrari's poetic text are mesmerizingly immersive and richly colorful within a palette of earth tones. Throughout the text, Gianferrari, who shares her inspiration for this book in the author's note ( Peter Wohleben's The Hidden Life of Trees ), gently maintains the human connection to trees and the connections (and communications) trees share with each other.  Be a Tree!  begins exuberantly, inviting the reader to "Be a tree! Stand tall. Stretch your branches to the sun. Let your roots curl, coil in the soil to ground you." From your spine/trunk to your skin/bark and your heart/pith, the words carry you inward and then zoom outward and up to the canopy and ultimately, the forest. "You are one of many trees," and our roots "twine with fung
Read more

Reading Levels: A Quick Guide to Determining if a Book Is Right for Your Reader

-
Image
While I wrote an article titled Reading Levels: How I Assign Reading Levels to Books, How the Publishers Do It and How You Can Help Your Reader Find the Right Book at the Right Time that discusses how reading levels are determined by professionals and amateurs like myself, there is more on this subject to discuss. Determining the reading level of a book from the children's section is never easy, mostly because there are several different standardized methods of determining reading levels. Add to this the fact that knowing their children's reading level is most often the only tool a parent is armed with when exploring the bookstore, library, website, etc, and the job becomes even more difficult. While I think that knowing a child's reading level is a very valuable tool if your child is reading below grade level, I think that it is a secondary consideration when finding books for children reading above, especially well above, grade level because, in most cases, content app
Read more