Fungi Grow, balances poetry, naturalistic STEM and entertainment

Fungi Grow is a smart illustrated book that operates like Chutes and Ladders, if it were laid over an MC Escher drawing with everything still making sense. This is the world of mushrooms. If you ever thought that it would be impossible to make a lyrical illustrated book that dances between poetry, educating kids about fungi and entertaining young readers all to the same degree, then this is just the sort of book that’ll grow on you. The fact that it’s an oversized book provides younger readers more opportunities to fill in the book at their own pace, hopefully letting them know that it’s normal to love to read. Will a cute rabbit and dozens of multi-colored mushrooms on the cover yield a new generation of mycologists?

A mycologist is one of the few, entry-level scientific mushroom terms that you won’t run across in Fungi Grow. And for the record, mycologists were consulted during the creation of this book for fungi accuracy. They’re someone who works with molds, yeast, and mushrooms, think of a person like Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters. But what could a career in that field yield, you ask yourself? It could certainly assist the industry that produces those serpentine, skinny mushrooms that I always burn. Think about fungi themselves, their characteristics and then look at them again in a new, entirely different, shade of light.

Why can mushrooms live and grow where plants can not? A black fungus, lovingly called “Hulk bugs”, has been growing unchecked for years at Chernobyl.  Scientists have discovered a fungus, confusingly called Aspergillus tubingensis, at a landfill in Pakistan that is capable of breaking down polyurethane. Mushrooms are nature’s ultimate composters and their existence in forests makes it possible for all of the tree in that area to communicate with one another.

Each page in Fungi Grow has much bigger text that works on a poetic level. It might rhyme or lyrically, concisely, tell a snippet of the fungi that’s featured on those pages. Those same pages will have a lushly illustrated scene of the area that the fungi calls home, some creatures that might live near them and its landscape. But wait, there’s more, those pages will also have, in smaller print, the names of the fungi or a more detailed description of the fungi.

A great example of this is the Stinkhorn mushroom. It’s appropriately named because, not only is it a phallic-shaped mushroom coming out of the ground, it smells like rotting flesh. This fungi smells like rotten meat to attract flies, who land on it and then take its spores with them when they fly away. We had one in our garden once and dug up the entire area, twice, in order to ensure that it never crossed our graces again. As a gardening phenomenon, it is amazing, however, as a practical thing that grows in the space near your residence it’s a nuisance that you wouldn’t wish upon your worst teacher in high school.

Fungi can produce poisons that will kill you. In tropical rainforests there’s a zombie ant fungus that infects the insect’s brain, makes it go to a location and locks its jaw on a plant leaf. Once the ant dies, a mushroom pops out of the insect’s head, which then goes on to kill even more ants. With a premise like this it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been introduced into a Saw movie yet. Fungi, specifically the mold penicillium was the basis for penicillin. They can do many other great things too and Fungi Grow has the potential to introduce elementary school ages to all of them.

For us, the book was slightly reminiscent of Fox, A Circle of Life Story, which ironically was also about composting. That book had brilliant art and tackled a topic that we didn’t think would make good fodder for an illustrated book. Fungi Grow takes the same track and offers up a book on fungi, a plant that most of us have thought very little about, yet delivers a book that will really make you think.

The book can also be a simple primer on naturalistic poetry. Much like the way a healthy mushroom needs the tall trees in order to live at the base of the forest floor, the illustrations provide the perfect tone and mood for whatever audience is reading the book. You could read it as a storytime book where adults only read the poetic elements. Mid-elementary students could read the poetry and use the smaller print or the notes and glossary that are at the back of the book for information to use in their essays.  Even younger kids might open the book and simply use it as illustrated wonderment to get lost in and enjoy books that they’ll grow to love. Any age that engage in Fungi Grow has the ability to catch one of the ladders up, and read more details about these spore-driven things that we don’t think much about.

Fungi Grow is by Maria Gianferrari with illustrations by Diana Sudyka and is available on Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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