Children's Book Review: Flowers Are Pretty Weird

Who adores flowers more than a bee? To pique the curiosity of the potential gardener, author Rosemary Mosco has created a "bee-lievable" narrator who knows the ins and out of many unusual species. In Flowers Are Pretty Weird, young readers can lite upon these many oddities through both artful words and images. After all, not all flowers are cute. Some are spooky and beware, some are outright dangerous.

Flowers, like so much in the world, are full of opposites, and learning to categorize is an important skill to acquire, both for new and old gardeners alike. Flowers can be ugly or beautiful, edible or poisonous, diurnal or nocturnal, teeny tiny, or as big as a truck tire. Some flowers stink, like dead meat, or even worse, for a good reason. Who knew that flowers lived underground? The Western Underground Orchid from Western Australia does. Mosco's bee narrator makes learning about flowers the opposite of boring.

In addition to exploring the modus operandi of many floral specimens, the author has a few literacy goals in mind. Throughout, the young reader is offered cues that it's okay to take a pause, encouraging a potential independent reader to feel free to set a book down. A book, after all, is easy to pick up wherever the reader left off.

Reading aloud is another of this picture book's obvious modes with lush and impressionistic illustrations by Jacob Souva. Each page is visually stimulating and offers much for the eye to explore, certainly enough to pull anyone away from the typically staid electronic device.

Mosco is an award-winning science writer and naturalist. In addition to picture books for young children, she also writes for middle schoolers. As a cartoonist, she has written graphic novels for teens. Flowers Are Pretty Weird is ideal for sharing with a child before it's time to turn the lights off or to investigate before an early morning woodland romp. There is even a short compendium of notable flowers with a brief description of their environment, where they grow in the world, and their scientific names.