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Don’t Eat Me!
The Almost True Story of Belladonna
By Kate Finney
Illustrated by Esmé Shapiro
What does survival look like when you can’t run away?
Once upon a time, there lived a tall and beautiful plant covered in flowers like the bells of sunset with berries as black as night.
Her name was Belladonna, and Belladonna had a problem. Most creatures knew her only as: “That delicious shrub on the hill.”
In Don’t Eat Me! The Almost True Story of Belladonna, meet a very harried Belladonna as she learns from a raspberry bush, an oak tree, and a cantankerous fungus how to answer the question posed to all plants: what does survival look like when you can’t run away?
Reviews
“The story will leave readers with an understanding of why some plants can’t be eaten—at least not by most creatures. Accompanied by lush art that imbues the various flora with expressive faces, the book also gets a great deal of comic mileage out of the different animals munching on Belladonna with gleeful abandon.
Sympathy for the poisonous—an empathetic glimpse of a much-maligned beauty. ” — Kirkus Reviews
Kate Finney Writes 