Official Review: Flowers, Butterflies and Bees

[Mallory Whitaker]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Flowers, Butterflies and Bees" by Rebecca Crosdale.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Rebecca Crosdale’s Flowers, Butterflies, and Bees is a children’s book that explores a flower’s symbiotic relationships with bees and butterflies. It’s aimed at toddlers and beginning readers.

The story takes place in a public garden. Some bees and butterflies are asking one another about flowers. A few nearby flowers overhear them, and they are more than happy to answer their questions. Through dialogue, the book covers a flower’s life cycle, various different types of flowers, and the many ways they are beneficial to others. The story touches on the life cycle of butterflies, and it gives a little information about bees, too. However, the bulk of information about bees and butterflies is about how they help flowers.

This book is 60 pages long; this includes 30 pages of text (with roughly two to three paragraphs per page) that are accompanied by an illustration on the following page. While I appreciated that the author chose to use photography rather than illustration, I found the quality to be lacking. Although, perhaps, this is only an issue with the PDF version I read. I also thought it would have been helpful to label what type of flower was in the image, as there are usually quite a few different flowers mentioned per page.

The formal language lends the book a fairy tale vibe. The author’s poetic style is different than what I’ve typically seen in children’s books for this particular age group. I enjoyed this when reading the descriptions of different flowers. However, sometimes I thought the poetic style was taken a bit too far. Lines like, “What wealth! All around is a diffusion of blessing,” struck me as too mature and stiff. The vocabulary is complex throughout, and the flowery language might be difficult for young children to follow. My toddler, who is almost four, had a difficult time understanding a lot of the book. The length also kept him from being able to give it his full attention. However, some parents may wish to use this book to challenge their children.

Vocabulary aside, there’s a lot for young readers to learn from this book. The life of a flower, how bees and butterflies help flowers, the importance of nurturing the natural world, and an appreciation of nature’s beauty are just some of the things they might glean from it.

Unfortunately, I found over ten errors in this book. Many of which involved punctuation errors in dialogue and verb-tense disagreements. Since some of these involved missing quotation marks, it was a bit distracting.

Due to the errors, the grainy photographs, and the sometimes stilted language, I am giving this 2 out of 4 stars. I didn’t give it a lower rating because I think it has educational value and a good message. If the errors were fixed, I would recommend this to parents who want to help expand their children’s vocabularies - especially about nature - and who want to teach their children more about the relationship between flowers, bees, and butterflies.

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Flowers, Butterflies and Bees
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[LuciusM]

I acknowledge authors who choose to use real photos to illustrations. Children can relate so quickly to real life and experiences. I will read this one. Thanks for your good review.

[_claudi_]

I understand you might not like a few things about the book but it doesn't take away the message passed across. Butterflies and bees are small but they are very essential. Good review.