There's No Such Thing as Vegetables

by Kyle Lukoff, Andrea Tsurumi (Illustrator)

Overview

A hilarious new picture book that exposes vegetables for what they truly are—leaves, roots, flowers, and stalks—by National Book Award Finalist and Newbery Honor winner Kyle Lukoff, perfect for fans of the Our Universe series.

Chester plans to have a salad for lunch, but in order to do that, he'll need vegetables. So, off he goes to the community garden, except he quickly learns that he won't be dressing a salad anytime soon. Instead, the vegetables start dressing him down. According to them, "vegetables" don't exist!

I know what you are thinking: What the bell pepper? Vegetables are totally real! But here's the thing: Kale is just a leaf, broccoli is a flower, potatoes are roots, and celery...well, stalks. Thanks to a lively, sassy cast of talking "veggies," Chester learns a valuable lesson about categories and how they shape our understanding of the world.

With a slyly informative text and illustrations that will crack readers up, the schooling in There's No Such Thing As Vegetables will be easy to digest and is a total treat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250867841
Publisher:	Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	8.70(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Kyle Lukoff is the author of the Newbery Honor-winning, National Book Award finalist, Too Bright to See, the Stonewall Award winner When Aidan Became a Brother, among other titles for young readers. While becoming a writer, he worked as a bookseller and school librarian. He lives in Philadelphia, and hopes you're having a nice day.

kylelukoff.com

Andrea Tsurumi (they/them) is an author, illustrator and cartoonist originally from New York who now lives with their spouse and dog in Philadelphia. A gigantic text and image nerd, they studied sequential storytelling for an English BA at Harvard and an illustration MFA at the School of Visual Arts. While working in publishing for several years, they dove into their two big loves: indie comics and children’s books. Their first book, Accident! was an NPR Great Read and their second book, Crab Cake, won the Vermont Red Clover Book Award. When they're not inventing croissant-based animals, they like reading about ordinary and ridiculous history.

andreatsurumi.com

Editorial Reviews

"A boy sets out for vegetables and gets an earful from a garden of anthropomorphic edible plants in funny, informational picture book . . . Tsurumi's pencil-drawn, digitally colored characters add buoyant humor to Lukoff's sly, kid-friendly demonstration of social constructs and plant biology factoids. The emotive garden flora is as rich in opinions as in nutrients. Young readers will likely giggle at their sass, which makes the educational components more palatable, just as the perfect dressing elevates a salad." —Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2023-11-04
A lesson in agriculture has larger implications in this deep dive into what constitutes a vegetable.

Sent to the community garden next door to pick some veggies for a meal, young Chester, who presents as Asian, is quick to discover that every supposed “vegetable” he encounters declares itself to be something else entirely. The broccoli claims to be a flower, the potato, a root, and the kale, a leaf. In fact, the supposed veggies all make the startling argument that there’s no such thing as vegetables. Chester attempts to fight back with facts, but every definition falls apart. Veggies are plants? So are trees. They don’t have sugar, suggests Chester. What about sugar beets? They’re good in salads? So’s bacon! Lukoff isn’t attempting to break down taxonomies but is instead making a larger point about the sometimes arbitrary ways in which humans label our world. Larger points about semantic satiation and social constructs may be lost on the elementary school crowd, but a story about plants arguing their way out of a salad bowl is funny no matter how you slice it. It helps enormously that the art is by Tsurumi, a master of hilarious visual gags and irate tomatoes, who brings to life in a cartoon-based format the gently defiant edibles.

Subversion in the salad! Destabilization with dressing! Social constructs fall by the wayside in this clever review. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews