Tuesday Storytime: Bugs!

All bugs, all the time.  We're getting into fall (hello equinox!) and that means that the temperatures around here get - lets go with "variable."  This means that the bugs are desperate for some consistency in their lives, which means that they all head indoors, where people invariably shriek and scream and call pest control companies to save them from the multi-legged invasion.  And so, my storytime for this week is born.  Also I'm working up to Halloween, so I have to do all the creepity storytimes while I can.

I Wish I Were a Butterfly
James Howe, illustrated by Ed Young
ISBN: 015200470X
Atmospheric watercolors aren't the best for keeping attention, but the story is so sweet.

A young cricket is convinced he's ugly, until he speaks to his old friend the spider, who convinces him that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that everyone's better off if you choose to believe the beholder who is actually your friend.  A sweet message of beauty, friendship, and self-confidence.  It is hella long tho, and the moody, dark, atmospheric paintings don't help hold the attention very well.

I Love Bugs!
Emma Dodd
ISBN: 9780823422807
Bold outlines and cartoonish proportions focus on all different types of bugs, including spiders.

Our narrator wants us to know how much they love all types of bugs in this super-short rhyming narrative that is heavy on the descriptive adjectives.  By the end, we sort of get the idea, but our closer is a celebration of the thrill that comes of being just slightly scared of something.  I like it because it presents fear of something (in this case, spiders) as humorous and thrilling, instead of something to be ashamed of or work through.

Some Bugs
Angela DiTerlizzi, illustrations by Brendan Wenzel
ISBN: 9781442458802
Funky big-eyed bugs feature heavily in what looks to be heavily textured collage scenes.

On first glance, this book OUGHT to be a lot shorter read than Dodd's I Love Bugs! but when I pre-read it, it didn't turn out that way.  Granted, the text IS shorter, but the problem that I faced was that the pages are so busy and vibrant, and the text is placed in the smallest-possible empty space, and those spaces are placed in such very different areas of the page spreads, that I had troubles finding the text reliably with each page-turn.  So this one was more of a stilted, stop-and-go, pause-ful read.  Not that it mattered, because the images are so vibrant and lively that the kids just wanted to look at all the bugs anyway, but it did bug me a little (haha, get it?) that I couldn't read it fluently page to page.