The Poetical Institute's Peculiar Powers of Vegetables & Fruits, by Sharada Keats and Jiajia Hamner (Tiny Tree Children's Books, 91 pages, 2019, $25.52)
How to Get Your Child to Eat Veggies? Have Him Read This Book!
Do you have an anti-veggie child or two? This book of mostly veggie-inspired poetry will not only entertain him/her but humorously educate him and have him eating out of your hand, so to speak. Young readers will focus on the wonderfully intricate pictures and fun, rhyming words and phrases: they will quickly commit several to memory and increase their vocabulary.
The combination of veggies and animals makes for a priceless chapter with fennel flamingoes, mushroom monkeys, pomegranate pronghorns and more. You can even take this book to the zoo or aquarium and get double your money's worth in education as you search for a few good exotic animals - or to the supermarket looking for kale kraken or passionfruit or paw-paw or dragonfruit dreams.
With references to Alan Turing even, the authors also include words that the average adult will have to look up (aubergine, vermillion, prehensile, gossamer)
"Fig fairies have sparkle and pizzazz galore. . . They can transform a newt to an ichthyosaur."
Detailed illustrations are worth of keeping if they had been posters - beautiful watercolors of very imaginative accompaniments to veggies of all colors and sizes (even their insides).
More Power to the Veggies! (and those who eat them)
The juxtaposition of veggies (or some fruits) with superpowers that one imbibes or ingests upon eating makes for a fun collection of 50 poems easy to digest and remember. The crowded front cover drawing does not do justice to those inside, but I bet your child will be able to identify each fruit and vegetable depicted plus name all the varieties of tomatoes and mushrooms (cherry, plum, beefsteak - canned, sweet, sour and portobello, oyster, shiitake, button).
It's a good thing Peculiar Powers is a hardback - it will be well-read - and often.
Caveat: This book was sent to me for review and I have only one question: where is the artichoke?
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