Smorgasbord Book Reviews – #Children’s – Amazing Matilda: A Monarch’s Tale by Bette A. Stevens

I enjoyed some great reading time over the holidays with a mix of all the genres including children’s books.. delighted to share my review for Amazing Matilda: A Monarch’s Tale by award winning children’s author is Bette A. Stevens definitely a book for young nature lovers

About Amazing Matilda: A Monarch’s Tale

(Ages 4-11 + grownups love it too) Friendship, patience and persistence are among the lessons learned in this gem of a tale featuring an amazing monarch butterfly.

This award-winning picture book adventure follows the monarch butterfly’s life cycle as Matilda embarks on a quest to make her dream of flying come true. Matilda emerges from her egg on a milkweed leaf—she stretches and yawns and knows she wants to fly. Sparrow tells her to follow her dreams. Toad and Rabbit laugh at a creature without wings who wants to fly. You’ll be as amazed as Toad and Rabbit are as you follow Matilda from egg to imago. Science, art and wise lessons for children—all wrapped up in a tale the kids will want to read/hear again and again!

My review for the book January 1st 2022

As an adult reading a children’s book, I look for and enjoy how an author shares life lessons embedded within the story. Bette A. Stevens does this very well using animals that a child would be familiar with, as the bearer of these inspiring but simple encouragements to be kind, to be patient and to perservere with life and tasks we are faced with.

Matilda goes through the complex phases in the life of a butterfly and the author shares these not just in the words of the story, but lovely illustrations which would catch a child’s attention and prompt a discussion between child and the storyteller An opportunity to emphasise elements of the tale and explore in more detail the creatures met during Matilda’s  transformation.

Bette Stevens has created a lovely book that any child would treasure and also would engage older members of the family too. Highly recommended.

Read the reviews and buy the book : Amazon US – And : Amazon UK

Also by Bette A. Stevens for Children and adults

Read the reviews and buy the books:Amazon US – and : Amazon UK – Follow Bette:Goodreads – Blog:4 Writers and Readers – Twitter:@BetteAStevens

About Bette A. Stevens

Inspired by nature and human nature, author Bette A. Stevens is a retired elementary and middle school teacher, a wife, mother of two and grandmother of eight. Stevens lives in central Maine with her husband on their 37-acre farmstead where she enjoys reading, writing, gardening, walking and reveling in the beauty of nature. She advocates for children and families, for childhood literacy and for the conservation of monarch butterflies (milkweed is the only plant that monarch caterpillars will eat). The author has also published the photography and poetry collection MY MAINE: Haiku through the Seasons

Stevens’s children’s book, THE TANGRAM ZOO and WORD PUZZLES TOO! was first published in 1997 by Windswept House Publishing, Mt. Desert, ME; a second edition was self-published by the author in 2012. AMAZING MATILDA, Stevens’s second children’s book, self-published in 2012 won a 2013 Purple Dragonfly Book Award (Honorable Mention for Excellence in Children’s Literature – Ages 6 and older category) and also placed #9 on The 2013 Gittle List for Self-published Children’s Picture Books. Stevens has written articles for ECHOES, The Northern Maine Journal of Rural Culture based in Caribou, Maine. In 2013, the author published her first book for the YA/Adult audience: PURE TRASH, a short story of a boy growing up in rural New England in a family whose poverty and alcoholism mark him as a target for bullying by young and old alike. This short story is a prequel to Stevens’s début novel DOG BONE SOUP (KCT International Literary Award Top Finalist 2017).

Thanks for dropping in today and I hope you will be leaving with some books… thanks Sally.