The Mystery of the Monarchs by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Erika Meza

The Mystery of the Monarchs is a Picture Book written for ages 4 to 8. It won the Newbery Medal in 2017 and I will be reviewing it as an Informational Book.

The Mystery of the Monarchs tells the true story of Fred and Norah Urquhart as they try to solve the puzzle of where monarch butterflies go in the winter.

I chose to read this book because it was a Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee and because my daughter, who is 5 years old, loves anything to do with natural science. One of her current fascinations is butterflies, so I selected this non-fiction book for us to enjoy together.

In this review I will be evaluating the Plot, Illustrations, and Accuracy

The central question within The Mystery of the Monarchs is "Where do the monarchs go?", and the story follows Fred Urquhart's lifelong quest to discover the answer (Rosenstock, 2022, p. 7). I appreciated that Rosenstock presented the Urquharts' history and discoveries as a story rather than as bullet-point facts. The book begins with Fred as a young boy and shows him falling in love with entomology when he is only 8 years old. It shows his life's journey of attending university, getting married, working as an entomologist, and becoming a father. These common life events, which young readers are familiar with, run parallel to his study of monarch butterflies. In this way, Rosenstock has taken what might be unfamiliar and placed it within a context children understand. The Mystery of the Monarchs introduces children to the scientific method, trial and error, data collection, migration tracking, and the lifecycle and migration patterns of butterflies without ever drawing attention to the fact that it is teaching. Adults and children alike will continue to turn the pages because they genuinely want to know if Fred was successful in his life's work and because they now share Fred's question of where the monarchs go.

The illustration within The Mystery of the Monarchs does a good job of complementing the narrative and creating a cohesive whole. I enjoyed how the illustrations helped move the reader south from Canada, where Fred and Norah Urquhart lived and began their butterfly quest, to Michoacan, Mexico (Rosenstock, 2022, p. 30). By subtly changing the color tones and background details on the page, Meza's illustrations help to move the book's setting as Fred's work attracts more participants from farther and farther away from his home in Canada. In addition, they help move the story through time, as Meza uses details in her illustrations to show Fred growing from a bug-loving 8-year-old to an old man whose lifelong question has finally been answered. However, I felt that, regarding the butterflies themselves, Meza's illustrations fell flat. They lack texture and variety, and while she did illustrate thousands of them, each illustration could be of the same specimen. Each butterfly is the same shade of orange, with the same dot pattern. Though the illustrations are vibrant and sure to be appreciated by young viewers, I believe that the butterflies, the book's true main character, deserved more from the illustration.

I found The Mystery of the Monarchs a well-researched and put-together book. Rosenstock included a thorough bibliography at the end of the book, as well as additional information on the life cycle of monarchs and their migration patterns. There is also information about how students and teachers helped Fred in the tagging and tracking of monarchs, which is sure to be interesting to young readers. this inclusion also encourages young readers to pursue their scientific questions by following Fred and these students' examples. However, an issue I found in the book's accuracy was presented in the illustrator's note at the end of the book. She wrote "the yearly arrival of the butterflies to [Purépecha and Mazahua native communities] was never a mystery to them. It simply was: they knew that, every winter, the monarchs would come" (Rosenstock, 2022, p. 28). However, this is the only time the native community's awareness of the butterflies is mentioned in the book, which feels like an injustice. The arrival of monarch butterflies is "part of the culture, landscape, and everyday life for the locals", and focusing on Fred solving the monarch mystery while simultaneously ignoring a cultural phenomenon that has existed for generations gives readers only a partial truth. This truth is born out of a privileged white perspective that values white history above world history, and white culture and discovery above the culture and knowledge of North America's indigenous populations. While it was fascinating to learn about all of the monarch butterflies descending from across the northern regions of North America to Michoacan, Mexico, the lack of a Mexican perspective on this journey takes away from this book's accuracy and is a missed opportunity to provide the complete story of the monarch butterfly.

Rosenstock, B. (2022). The mystery of the monarchs: How kids, teachers, and butterfly fans helped Fred and Norah Urquhart track the great monarch migration (E. Meza, Illus.). Alfred A Knopf Books for Young Readers.