PLANT ATTACK!

When danger looms, plants get tough.

Silver offers a companion book to Mighty Scared: The Amazing Ways Animals Defend Themselves (2024), introducing readers to plant defenses, the fiercer the better. From roses with sharp prickles (distinguished from thorns in the glossary) to invasive hydrillas, aquatic plants that keep sunlight from the fish beneath, she highlights 13 species whose defenses she finds “cool and courageous.” She covers stinking corpse flowers, exploding pods on touch-me-not balsams, and Venus flytraps, with their snapping jaws. On each spread, she examines a different plant, providing a short expository paragraph describing its defense, a “fierce fact,” and a slangy “Get To Know Me” section narrated by the plant. The actual information is rather skimpy and occasionally inaccurate. Silver doesn’t always note where these plants can be found. She notes that poison ivy vines grow between one and four feet tall, when in fact they can grow up into the tree canopy. And while a diagram refers to the clear liquid in coconuts as milk, it’s in fact water (milk is made from the flesh). McLaughlin’s bright and lively digital illustrations depict all the plants on the opening spread. At times, the artwork personifies both flora and fauna, to readers’ delight. Diverse humans can be seen interacting with the plants. A final spread compares some of these defenses with ways that humans protect themselves, though the examples are a bit of a stretch.

Entertaining and modestly informative.