Lemon Butterfly

About the Author\nCao Wenxuan is an award winning novelist from Jiangsu Province, China. He is the Vice President of the Beijing Writers Association and a professor at Peking University. His works include The Straw House, Dragonfly Eye, and Bronze and Sunflower. He was the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award. His novels have been translated into eight languages.\nA lemon butterfly is searching for the most beautiful thing in the world, a field of flowers. Through barren wilds, across a wide river, and over a bald mountain the butterfly continues the search until its final miraculous transformation.\nFrom School Library Journal\nGr 1–2—A Lemon Butterfly searches for a field of flowers through real and imagined landscapes. When it finally finds the flowers, they are inaccessible; the field is flooded and the flowers hover beneath the surface. Try as it may, Lemon Butterfly cannot breach the watery barrier, and in its acquiescence to that reality, transforms into a Lemon Butterfly Fish. Cao's story of destiny and determination, told mostly in short graceful couplets, reiterates the theme of his earlier collaboration with Mello, Feather, including the search for one's place, the drive forward without self-awareness, ending with acceptance of life's mystery. Mello's images follow his own interpretation of the Lemon Butterfly's experience. The barren wilderness it flies over is depicted as a black and white Escher-like series of line-drawn folds and steps. That spread is followed by a thickly painted still life perceived by the butterfly as a river, and a tree with branches. Some pages offer negative space and the flash of yellow butterfly against a plain background becomes a surprise and a reminder. VERDICT With an abundance of lessons in a simple story—getting where you're going, accepting where you are, seeing your surroundings from your own point of view, making mistakes, and going back to fix them—this title belongs alongside Feather, and will circulate among a similar demographic of thoughtful readers.—Lisa Lehmuller, Paul Cuffee Maritime Charter Sch., Providence