Early Book Review: Bugs in Danger: Our Vanishing Bees, Butterflies, and Beetles by Mark Kurlansky, Jia Liu

Bugs in Danger: Our Vanishing Bees, Butterflies, and Beetles is a children's non fiction book written by Mark Kurlansky and illustrated by Jia Liu. It is currently scheduled for release on November 12 2019. 

By now you’ve probably heard that bees are disappearing, and they aren’t the only species at risk. Populations of fireflies, butterflies, and ladybugs have also been declining in recent years. This book explains the growth, spread, and recent declines of each of these four types of insects. It looks at the human causes, like the Baltimore electric company that collected fireflies to attempt to harness their phosphorescent lighting source, to natural occurrences, like the mysterious colony collapse disorder that plagues bee populations. This book makes an effort to show just how much bugs matter to our world.

Bugs in Danger is a well researched, organized, and written nonfiction book. It is fairly dense, to cover all the necessary information, so I would recommend it for middle grade and higher level reader- and adults. I will admit that there were a few moments in the technical explanation about the classifications of life that my eyes and mind wandered a bit. Since this is very early in the book, I worry that some less than dedicated readers might zone out, or maybe just skip ahead. While I have read quite a bit about butterflies and bees, I learned more about those insects and more about critters that I never gave much thought to. There is simply so much information here that I would recommend taking it one section at a time, and I think it would stand up well to multiple revisits. The illustrations are small, and add some visual interest to the read. I found that the text boxes that are scattered through the book also include interesting information and helped break up some of the text. The inclusion of suggestions for what readers can do are doable, I love when authors include the simple things that can help make change, not just the big action. This makes it much more likely that people will make the effort to make some change, and then maybe more as they get comfortable. I liked that the author gave readers a bibliography, that separated out some resources for younger readers and included the most useful website that they know of on the topic. 

Bugs in Danger is an extremely informative book about the insects in our world, their importance, and what factors are affecting their decline. I recommend it for readers with interest in the insect world, the environment, and science. It would be an asset to classrooms and libraries.