Hurry and the Monarch - Hardcover

Antoine Ó Flatharta’s previous children’s book, The Prairie Train, won the Western Writers of America Spur Award. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Meilo So’s watercolor illustrations have graced a number of children’s books about nature, including Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City and The Beauty of the Beast: Poems from the Animal Kingdom. He lives in the Shetland Islands, Scotland.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

*Starred Review* PreS-Gr. 2. In a tale that recalls Leo Leonni's classic interspecies fable Fish Is Fish (1970), a migrating butterfly provides Hurry, a Texas tortoise, with perspective on the world beyond his garden. "Maybe one day, you'll break out of that shell, grow wings, and fly away," the butterfly remarks to Hurry. "I doubt it," he replies, then contentedly settles down to hibernate. He wakes in the spring to see the same butterfly alight on a milkweed plant and deposit an egg, which hatches into a caterpillar that metamorphoses under Hurry's watchful eye. Flatharta avoids heavy anthropomorphizing and romanticized views of nature: the migrating monarchs are as likely to stop to rest on a coil of barbed wire as on a picturesque flower, and the reality of insect life spans is gently but unequivocally addressed when the mother monarch's quick stop to rest "becomes forever." Veined with a tracery of inked details, So's subtle watercolors reference both Asian nature-painting traditions and the limited palette of artwork in the early days of color printing. Together with its informative afterword, this is a particularly attractive, affecting introduction to the wonder of species diversity and the elegant continuum of life. Jennifer Mattson
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