Oh, this is a lovely, lovely book. It captures the magical moment when a child becomes one with the natural world, and it is illustrated in a lyrical and evocative style. This one made me cry- it conjured up my childhood with a startling immediacy. I was something of a Monarch aficionado as a child, and this book spoke to me on many levels. Highly recommended for those in love with the world of magical insects. ( )

Beautifully illustrated book about the migration of the monarch butterfly.

I didn't like the style, it was meant to be poetic but felt disjointed. Here's an example:
Finally, we head back to the car.
Mom tells me she remembers
seeing the migrating butterflies,
once before,
when she was a girl.

The illustrations were nice, kind of oil painting ish and dark in a rich way, not a foreboding way.

The big idea was appreciating memories with your family and appreciating beautiful and amazing events in nature, like the migration of monarch butterflies.

One September day, while Jilly is on the shores of Lake Erie throwing a stick for her dog, Fudge, she notices an orange cloud coming closer to the beach. At first, she worries that it's smoke from a fire or volcanic fallout or even an alien spacecraft. When she tells her mom about it, though, the two hurry off into the woods in search of the mysterious orange cloud. Just when Jilly is ready to turn back, the two discover an ordinary tree covered in orange leaves, but when Fudge races through chasing a squirrel, the tree suddenly bursts into a magical flurry of monarch butterflies.

Markle's verse vividly renders a memory of the migrating butterflies drawn from her own childhood. Her detailed descriptions capture the atmosphere of the woods and the magic of discovering something for the first time. Wu's illustrations are perfectly suited to the story. Her beautiful impressionistic paintings reveal the perfect cast of the light and the motion of a hundred fluttering butterflies but with soft edges that gives the sense of a rare, beautiful moment being viewed throught the lens of memory.

Young readers will be taken in by the bright colors and the suspense in the search. Older readers might well be reminded of the wonder and the opportunities for discovery that nature offered us when we were children and still today if we slow down long enough to see. ( )

A girl, her dog, and her mom see what looks like an orange cloud in the distance, so they set out to find out what it is. When they arrive at the cloud, they discover that it is not a cloud at all, but thousands and thousands of butterflies.

Beautiful double-page paintings combined with poetic text make this a lovely book.

“An explosion
of golden-orange bits
fills the sunlight
streaming between branches.

Wow! I exclaim. They’re not leaves.
They’re butterflies.

Monarch butterflies, Mom says.

There must be hundreds---thousands.
The tree looks like it is in motion.
All the butterflies are slowly fanning their wings.” ( )