The Butterfly Gang
Airy McCurdy
Paperback
(Independently published, Dec. 2, 2018)
The Butterfly Gang is the story of a blue boy butterfly, Tad. Boy butterflies hadn't been seen in 158 years, and Tad didn't know how to fly or how to be a butterfly at all. Until one day, Tad is met in a garden by Ariel, Daphne, and Mariposa, who are in shock to see a blue butterfly. With the longest migration of any insect just about to start, the girls decide they cannot leave Tad, the first blue butterfly to be seen alone and lost. This 5,000-mile journey takes the reader from the perspective and experience of a butterfly on an adventure, exploring a new world with thought-provoking analogies pertaining to the vicissitudes of life that are simplified for a child with humor and emotion. There is a lot of discovery in The Butterfly Gang. From learning to appreciate the effort and value of what your friends’ words mean, to working together and each contributing to the journey and managing the dangers encountered on the way. With readers looking for diversity, the characters offer unique qualities and heritage, one butterfly being a Spanish speaker; with characters being unique but part of a gang, it will most certainly speak to that element. The Butterfly Gang is set in present time, taking the reader on a journey starting in the upper-eastern northern seaboard through the south and to El Rosario, Mexico where hundreds of millions of butterflies actually gather yearly. This story will awaken the butterfly in you and along the way will bring laughter, smiles, and tears to your eyes. The Butterfly Gang is a children's fiction chapter book, appropriate for children 7-12 years of age and for adults who read to children. Butterflies see things that we don't see, and this story shows us the world through their eyes, a world that will be both familiar and new to the reader. This is the story about how the first Butterfly Gang formed. The characters Tad, Ariel, Daphne, and Mariposa are multidimensional, multilingual, playful, animated, and fun, and each offers unique qualities that help them complete their migration to El Rosario, their destination at the end of a 5,000-mile journey. The Butterfly Gang is camouflaged as a children's book, but inevitably pulls generations of readers to it and is a great read for parent/grandparent to a child. The adult will walk away with childlike enthusiasm and wonder who was the book really for? The journey I tell is an actual one that hundreds of millions of butterflies take every year to El Rosario, Mexico. You will see the multi-cultural aspect of the characters and the international journey these butterflies take.