Mushroom Rain
2022
Mushroom Rain is another children's picture book, this time non-fiction. I first saw it at a bookshop on a trip to Asheville, and I've been wanting to see it again ever since.
The majority of the book is written very simply for young readers, and serves as a showcase for Green's beautiful art. The last couple pages provide more information about every mushroom fact stated earlier, maybe for slightly older kids who want to know more, or maybe for parents, to help them answer questions that might come up along the way.
It rains, and mushrooms appear, painted simply, and depicted larger than life-size. We learn a bit about the staggering variety of mushrooms, about what eats them, about how the fungal mycelium works and how it persists when no part of it is visible above ground. We learn how mushrooms spread reproductive spores to spread the mycelium. We learn something I didn't know yet, that mushroom spores, lile other particulate, can help to seed clouds, and then we end where we began, the cycle complete, with a mushroom rain.
The primary attraction of this book is the art, but Zimmermann's writing is clear and informative, and should help kids understand the basics about an often mysterious branch on the tree of life.
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