Book Description
for The Very Hungry Plant by Renato Moriconi
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
A hilarious story about a carnivorous plant that eats everything and everyone it comes into contact with begins with a caterpillar (perhaps of the very hungry variety itself), a butterfly, a spider, and a gecko. The plant’s hunger is insatiable, and it goes on to eat larger and more fantastical things: a gymnast, an entire airplane, a flying mammoth, some aliens, and an angel choir. Finally, the plant’s hunger is satisfied and it stops to rest. But wait! There’s something looming just above the plant, an enormous mouth that slowly swallows the plant over the course of two wordless double-page spreads. It’s a hungry dinosaur—herbivorous, of course. Acrylic illustrations show the plant growing slightly larger with each morsel of food, while text appears in oversized hand-painted letters on the facing page. In an endnote, the Brazilian author writes that the story came to him as he was eating in a restaurant with a friend who accidentally swallowed a fly when he opened his mouth to take a bite. (Ages 3-6)
CCBC Choices 2022. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2022. Used with permission.