THE VERY HUNGRY PLANT

A plant satisfies its hunger with increasingly outlandish meals, until denouement by herbivore.

Moriconi’s text begins with a faintly scientific fact: Sunlight cannot satisfy this carnivorous sprout’s hunger. “That’s why it ate a caterpillar that was passing by.” The plant’s gaping, V-shaped, red-toothed mouth and impending prey suspended in midair above form the visual template for the recto illustrations throughout. After a couple of insects and a spider, the plant consumes a gecko, a rabbit, and a gymnast, growing larger and leafier with each meal. Moriconi’s obvious nod to the amusing dietary choices of Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar ratchets to absurdist heights as the plant eats a flying mammoth, a “bunch of witches,” and a dragon. Understandably sated after ingesting “an angel choir,” its 14th meal, the plant, faux biblically, “stopped eating and rested.” A page devoid of the outsized, hand-lettered text faces the corpulent plant beneath a new, enveloping presence. A page flip reveals the devouring, green-eyed, orange head of “a hungry, herbivorous dinosaur.” Inspired by a friend—a vegetarian restaurateur whose yawn swallowed a fly—Moriconi’s allegory playfully skewers (among other pedantry) children’s literature’s hagiographic tendencies.

Both a kid-pleasing snack and a philosophical amuse-bouche.