Local author conjures a mushroom world with debut novel

Local author conjures a mushroom world with debut novel

There’s just something magical about mushrooms.For freshman author Matthew Donovan, who recently published his illustrated novel On the Wisdom of Toads, there’s always been something of an electric allure when it comes to fungi. He’s studied them at the University of Guelph, captured them in botanical drawings, and even learned how to grow them himself.So when he sat down to start writing his debut novel a couple of years ago, he populated his f…