Club Microbe by Elise Gravel is an adorable and informative look at the microbial world.
Club Microbe
Elise Gravel
Translated by Montana Kane
Drawn & Quarterly
April 2, 2024
My kid and I are both big fans of Elise Gravel’s wonderful 2018 book, The Mushroom Fan Club. When that one came out, it turned me into a confirmed fan, and I was ready and waiting when Gravel came out with The Bug Club in 2021. And I also enjoy the new installments of her Disgusting Critters series—featuring such stars as The Slug and The Cockroach—every few years. It’s impressive output!
So we were both thrilled to learn about Club Microbe, and it is everything we’d hoped for.
In all these books, Gravel depicts her subjects, whether they are morel mushrooms or meningococcus bacteria, in bright, cheerful colors with rounded lines and happy little cartoon faces. She writes in the first person about what she finds interesting about the topic, presenting scientific facts clearly and enthusiastically for young readers (and for me).
I could see this functioning well as a read-aloud for toddlers, while an interested independent reader could easily read it on their own, though of course many of the microbes have very long names.
Gravel lives in Canada and writes in French, and in the U.S. and Canada her books for young readers are published in English translations by Drawn and Quarterly, in beautifully produced hardback books with thick pages and a lot of color saturation in the illustrations.
I hadn’t considered myself a particular fan of microbes, but maybe I am? Before reading Club Microbe, I also recently read I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong.
Yong’s book is a highly acclaimed and engaging chonker, with about 350 pages of densely packed text including a bibliography and index. It details for adult readers the ways that microbes shape our lives, and could be used to shape our lives even more proactively in the future.
I was therefore extremely impressed with how many of the concepts I learned from I Contain Multitudes were included in Elise Gravel’s Club Microbe, a book of about 50 pages of images with very few words on each.
My kid and I both found the whole book extremely engaging, and full of fun facts to know about where microbes are found and what the different varieties are. It’s neat to know microbes survive at the bottom of the ocean and on the International Space Station, and how viruses and bacteria are different. My kid was a little unsettled to learn how pretty the coronavirus is, however.
As with The Bug Club and the Disgusting Critters series, part of Gravel’s project is to show that things we tend to vilify are important parts of a well-functioning world. So in Club Microbe, many of the pages are devoted to the microbes that make life better for us, everything from healthy gut bacteria to the bacterium that helps snowflakes form.
This is a gem of a book I’m pleased to shelve next to The Mushroom Fan Club, and I’m sure my kid and I will both revisit it just as frequently as the years go on. You never know when you’re going to need to consult an illustration of an adorable little glowing photobacterium leiognathi with a face.
