60 books like Butterfly Dreams

This is another funny pick that gets my kids giggling.

The main character is a butterfly with an endless amount of questions and plenty of excuses about why they can’t sleep (hmm…reminds me VERY MUCH of some children I know…). Butterfly’s friend Porcupine has good suggestions for Butterfly (and anyone else who needs to get to sleep already!) to try.

My husband and I met in the newsroom at the Houston Post newspaper. On paper, I guess you could say we had the same job: writing for the newspaper.

But like Lawson Gale and Jack Brighton in this book, both of whom work to preserve the environment, our jobs weren’t the same at all. He was a political reporter while I was an arts reviewer. We have completely different passions.

When lepidopterist Lawson travels to Tasmania to find and protect an endangered butterfly, he’s escorted by Parks and Wildlife officer Jack and his Border collie. I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited to read this book, but did because a friend said it was “good”.

Since I have almost no interest in endangered butterflies and environmental problems, I was hoping for “goodish mediocre”. What I got was brilliance. The book is funny, suspenseful, playful, and romantic.

The bottom line is even… show more.

This book is a classic natural history quest: Patrick Barkham tries to find all the butterfly species in Britain and Ireland in one summer. It explores our age-old relationship with these fantastic insects, the eccentricities of the butterfly watcher's world, and the author’s adventures along the way, all tied together by the challenge he’s set himself. This is a really entertaining book and brilliantly captures the butterfly obsession, offering an excellent portrayal of what makes butterfly watchers tick.

On Monday, a tiny, very hungry caterpillar ate through one apple. 

"But he was still hungry." 

On Tuesday, he ate through two pears, on Wednesday, three plums, and so on through the week. 

When he gets to Saturday, he eats way too much, starting with one piece of chocolate cake and ending with one slice of watermelon. 

That night he has a stomach ache! The caterpillar recovers on Sunday and, no longer tiny and no longer hungry, he builds a small house around himself called a cocoon.

In time, he becomes a beautiful butterfly.

With cutout pages and gorgeous Eric Carle art, this book is a joy to share with young children. 

This book is both absolutely gorgeous and deeply disturbing.

The premise is simple: in an FBI interview, a young woman recounts the horrific ordeal she’s survived as a member of a serial killer’s “garden” of kidnapped victims. The reading experience is considerably more complex. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, allowing the reader to explore Maya’s experience in the Garden; that’s then balanced with her FBI interview, filling in blanks and establishing her as an almost-reliable narrator.

The dual timeline—one of my favorite devices to read and write—is handled brilliantly, and Hutchinson successfully achieves a formidable tightrope act, balancing the brutality of torture and murder with an elegant and refined narrative.

Her darkness is graceful—but it’s still darkness. 

When I picture a butterfly, I imagine a delicate, lovely creature gliding across the sky. Not a foul-smelling flying creature that feeds on rotting flesh. But that’s the secret side of our (formerly) favorite insects that we meet through our knowledgeable monarch butterfly narrator.

My students couldn’t get enough of this fascinatingly disgusting book.

This is a gentle, lyrical story. This book inspires love. If you read it, you’ll feel the loving relationship the girl has with her grandfather...and with butterflies. You’ll wonder why the butterflies visit the girl once she’s grown up. What do the butterflies who visit her seem to know or sense? Why aren’t the butterflies visiting her neighbors?

I first read this book pre-publication in 2016, and I still think about it at least once a week.

The story is a haunting portrayal of a girl lost in a blended family with a stepmother who treats her worse than Cinderella and a father who only wants to see the shiny surface of his shiny new family. It’s told in a then/now timeline which slowly reveals not only what June did to land her on death row but the abuse she endured that got her there. This one is heavy, but oh so worth the read.

This past year, I have been fascinated by butterflies, and especially the monarchs and their utterly magnificent flights of migration. But there are other books about monarch butterflies, so why this one? It is a story, fictitious admittedly, about how a group of children with passion and love for nature and butterflies face a growing problem using grassroots activism. It is based on what children and communities are doing to help butterflies all over the country and on the real issue of the decline of the monarch butterfly. It is sure to inspire the budding environmental activist.

The ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu has been translated many times, but Burton Watson’s 1968 version is still my favorite, best capturing the wit and humor of this playful Daoist.

Chuang Tzu constantly pokes at our philosophical and moral presumptions. Reading him, I feel my smugness and arrogance melting away in favor of joyful doubt and wonder. Chuang Tzu dreams he is a butterfly, flitting about, doing just as he pleases, and then he wakes up, solid and unmistakable Chuang. But is he a human who has just dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he’s a human?

Instead of rushing about busily, thinking we understand things, maybe we should doze beneath a giant, useless tree in the field of the bright and boundless.