Kyle Lukoff – Mom Read It

There’s No Such Thing as Vegetables, by Kyle Lukoff/Illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi, (Feb. 2024, Henry Holt & Company), $18.99, ISBN: 9781250867841

Ages 4-8

Chester is a kid who just wants to get some vegetables from the community garden so his mom can make him a salad. He gets schooled by the garden’s inhabitants on the many groups that fall under the “vegetable umbrella”. Broccoli? That’s a flower, and her name is Juanita, thank you very much. Potato and Carrot? Those are roots; Lettuce and Kale? Those are leaves. Cucumber, Pepper, and Eggplant are all fruits. Different groups explain their importance and their jobs to Chester with often hilarious moments: Lettuce informs Chester that being good in a salad doesn’t make one a vegetable: “…bacon is good in salads, but that doesn’t make bacon a vegetable”. When Chester claims that vegetables taste good but don’t have a lot of sugar, Beet corrects him, noting that “they literally use me to make sugar”. So why are all these different groups of tasty foods grouped under one term? “Say anything enough times and it’ll stop sounding like a real word”, replies Corn. Newbery Honor Award and Stonewall Award winner Lukoff takes a funny story about vegetables to teach a lesson on social constructs, and an author’s note at the end of the story invites readers to think about and discuss other social constructs. Tsurumi’s illustrated vegetables have personality, and Chester is sweetly exasperated as he tries to work it all out. Endpapers show the group of of sassy “vegetables”, clearly labeled to help readers identify them. Download free activity worksheets here.

Kyle Lukoff is a Newbery Honoree, a Stonewall Award winner, and a National Book Award finalist. Visit his author page to learn more about his books and upcoming events. Illustrator Andrea Tsurumi is a Society of Illustrators Silver Medalist and Red Clover Book Award recipient. You can visit their author page to read their comics and learn more about their books.

A Storytelling of Ravens, by Kyle Lukoff/Illustrated by Natalie Nelson, (May 2018, Groundwood Books), $17.95, ISBN: 9781554989126

Recommended for readers ages 5-8

If you loved Lane Smith’s There is a Tribe of Kids (2016), you’ll get a kick out of A Storytelling of Ravens, which finds new animal collectives to name and puts each group in an amusing context. A nuisance of cats blames some wayward yarn on a sleeping dog; a trip of sheep looks away from one clumsy member in pure embarassment; a knot of toads get their tongues in a – well, a knot, really – over a tasty fly. Where There is a Tribe of Kids follows one child through animal groups as he searches for his tribe, the animals are at the silly focus of this book, which shows readers how to have more fun with words – something I thoroughly enjoy doing in my storytimes. Tell your kiddos that a group of jellyfish is known as a smack, and they will have fun with that for HOURS. Trust me. I have a five-year-old, I know. The art is an eclectic mix of gouache paint, ink drawings, found photographs, and digital collage, giving the book a funky, vintage art feel. This one is fun for English classes, fun for nature/science classes, and fun for storytime – try introducing it to readers during an animal storytime. I think I’m going to give some flannels a shot with this one, now that I think of it.

Pair this with more wordplay books like TOON’s Wordplay graphic novel by Ivan Brunetti, Michaël Ecoffier’s Take Away the A, or Tara Lazar’s hilarious book, 7 Ate 9.

Tag: Kyle Lukoff

Fun with words: A Storytelling of Ravens