When plants attack: Strange and terrifying plants by Rebecca E. Hirsch

When I first saw this, I immediately thought of Rebecca Johnson's 2014 title, When lunch fights back. That title focused primarily on animals, but with a similar layout, and finished with a brief mention of how some plants seem to use a kind of thought process to fight back against creatures trying to eat them. This book starts where Lunch left off with the many clever defenses of plants.

Of course there's the traditionally carnivorous plants, pitcher plants, Venus fly traps, and so forth, but Hirsch goes beyond this with the horrifically painful and sometimes deadly stinging tree, the clever defense of the thorn acacia, which protects itself from elephants by attracting stinging ants, or the apparently inadvertent killer, the Pisonia grandis, which sticks its seeds to seabirds in such numbers that it kills many of them, littering the ground about with corpses and skeletons.

Hirsch goes beyond anecdotes and dramatic tales of deadly plants to question how and why plants developed these defenses, how they use them, and what it means for considering how plants react, behave, or even think. Extensive back matter includes an author's note, source notes, glossary, bibliography, further reading, websites, and videos, and an index.

Verdict: The dramatic cover and introduction will draw in reluctant readers who will find themselves learning quite a bit about plants - and scientific research - as they devour the gruesome stories of plant defenses and survival tricks. Recommended.

ISBN: 9781541526709; Published January 2019 by Milbrook; Borrowed from another library in my consortium