Jonathan Case

You'd think a story with people worried about being killed by sunlight would involve vampires . . . but nope.

You'd think a post-apocalypse story with people running around waving butterfly nets must be about how the stark conditions have driven them insane . . . but nope.

You'd think loading the story with educational material about the life cycles and migratory routes of monarch butterflies would tend to bog things down . . . but . . . well, yeah, yeah, it does. But that's mostly the first third of the book, and things improve considerably in the back end.

In a kiddy variation on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Flora and Elvire, a woman and a ten-year-old girl, wander a post-apocalyptic landscape in the year 2101. Humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction due to a change in the quality of sunlight that causes a fatal change in heart rhythms (?!), so most people live deep underground during the day to block the lethal rays. But Flora has developed a medicine from monarch butterflies that gives temporary protection so she and Elvire can walk in daylight, and she is working on a permanent cure.

There are dangerous natural disasters to survive, but of course the most hazardous part of their lives is deciding which surviving humans to fear and and which to trust. About a third of the way through they break out of their insular science fair mode, where there are too many expositional pages of text, and start interacting with other people so the story can finally start building up some momentum. By the end, I was quite engaged with their ups and downs and really pulling for them to catch a break.

(Another project! I'm trying to read all the picture books and graphic novels on the kids section of NPR's Books We Love 2022.)… (altro)