Little Monarchs - Signed and Sketched-in Hardcover with Milkweed Seed Packet
Little Monarchs - Signed and Sketched-in Hardcover with Milkweed Seed Packet
"A masterfully-painted, pitch-perfect balance between tension and tenderness, Little Monarchs is all I want comics to be." —Vera Brosgol, Caldecott Honoree for Leave Me Alone, Eisner winner for Anya's Ghost
All North American orders of this edition include a packet of hand-selected milkweed seeds native to your region — the only food source of monarch caterpillars. Please plant these to support struggling monarch butterflies and the miracle of their migration!
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and starred Booklist review
This graphic novel adventure tells the story of 10-year-old Elvie and her crucial mission to save humanity from extinction after a sun shift has changed life on earth as we know it.
It’s been fifty years since sun sickness wiped out nearly all mammal life across the earth. Towns and cities are abandoned relics. The world is slowly being reclaimed by nature except for roadways here and there that autonomous machines maintain. The few communities of people who survive keep to themselves in underground sites, only able to come out at night.
But now there are two humans who can survive during the daylight—10-year-old Elvie and her caretaker, Flora, a biologist, who has made an incredible discovery of how to make an antidote to sun sickness using a few scales from monarch butterfly wings. To do this they follow the monarchs as they migrate through what was once the western United States. As wonderful as this is, they can only make enough medicine for themselves and are determined to find a way to develop a vaccine that can be shared with everyone.
Will they be successful in their mission? Or will they fall to natural disaster, sickness, or even the very people they’re trying to save?
Little Monarchs is a new kind of graphic novel adventure—one that invites readers to take an intimate look at the natural world and the secrets hidden within. Elvie and Flora’s adventures take place in real locations marked panel-by-panel with coordinates and a compass heading. Curious readers can follow their travel routes and see the same landscapes—whether it be a secluded butterfly grove on the California coast or a hot-springs in the high desert. Through both comic narrative and journal entries, readers learn the basics of star navigation, how to tie useful knots, and other survival skills applicable in the natural world.
Creator Jonathan Case acquired the fact-based portion of Little Monarchs through intensive research and several expeditions to study monarchs across the western United States. Scientific support also came from the Xerces Society, the world leaders in monarch preservation.