Childhood Book Filter: Talking Plants in Kansas

July 11, 2022 1:40 PM

A friend is looking for a barely-remembered book: "It was a book about people living underground with vines that could talk after some sort of war. It was set under Salina, Kansas."

Friend is the same age I am, ish, so around 50 and this would have been read in the 1980s.

I have infinite faith in Metafliter to identify this (and any other) book...

posted by DarlingBri to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Possible long shot: Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog, written in the late 1960's, some of which takes place in a post-nuclear Holocaust underground city named Topeka, and featuring talking dogs.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 1:51 PM on July 11, 2022

That couldn't be some kind of half-memory of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Below the Root and its sequels, could it? There's no Kansas involved but it was widely available in the eighties and involves people living underground plus the ability to talk to plants and it is precisely the sort of book one would remember long afterward. The people fled their original planet because of war and discourse about war is a big part of the books.
posted by Frowner at 2:11 PM on July 11, 2022

Also a long shot, but Swan Song features Kansas and underground, and a girl who can commune with plants. Definitely not a kid's book though.
posted by nakedmolerats at 5:43 PM on July 11, 2022

Sadly, it is none of these. But thank you!
posted by DarlingBri at 1:31 PM on July 12, 2022