Moth & Butterfly: Ta-Da! by Dev Petty and Ana Aranda

Hello, Dev Petty! Welcome back to Watch. Connect. Read.! I always love when you stop by to share a new book trailer. Hooray! What do you want everyone to know about Moth & Butterfly: Ta-Da! before they watch its book trailer?

Dev Petty: First off, thanks for having me. These relationships, these Kidlit relationships connected through books and children and love of ideas is what's sustained me in these dark days. I'm SO grateful for people like you and this community at large.

As to Moth & Butterfly Ta-Da! I want everyone to know that it's beautiful. That's an overused word sometimes, but it is. Ana Aranda speaks through color and charm and movement to create something deeply unique and totally beautiful, but still accessible.

This book is so good for kids right now. Sure it has STEM elements, life-cycles, invertebrates, moth & butterfly differences. But beyond that, it speaks to change. You have two caterpillars who are just sitting around eating leaves together, goofing off. They don't know why, it doesn't matter. But they become friends. When they metamorphosize, they don't know things will be different on the flip side.

Moth & Butterfly Ta-Da! speaks to how we change as individuals and in friendships. How we adjust and we distill the parts of life we need so we are satiated, so we honor our efforts and our personalities. And in this era with so much polarization, it shows that true friendship lasts and finds common ground even through differences.

This book leans a little younger. I hope early classrooms will include it while they nurture caterpillars and other wee creatures. But the lessons inside this book- about true friendship. About common ground. About tolerating change are ones, these days, we can all relate to.

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Ana Aranda’s illustrations are ELECTRIC. Unique. Bright. Inspired. I see in her work in this book that she really "got" what I was after. But beyond that, she created a world of color and beauty and kindness. They have so much heart. Whatever world she was pulling from, I'd like to go there.

Moths and butterflies are different! And I'm sure it is hard for Moth (as you see in the book) to look at Butterfly's bright, colorful, graceful wings and reflect on his own beige, uncooperative appendages. Moth sleeps in the day and flies, clumsily, at night. Butterfly loves the sun and doing graceful loops in the day. She likes to stand out, Moth likes to blend in. But true friendship doesn't care about that. It finds a way.

Nancy Paulsen Books is amazing to work with. Nancy is brilliant and able to see what you were going for and make it more whole and refined. She just has a sense of how to distill things to their most lovely form. If only pairing Ana and me together! I learned a LOT working with her. It is a stunning gift to get to learn so much from an editor. I'm ever grateful.

Dev Petty is the author of I DON'T WANT TO BE A FROG (Doubleday) -along with a few other FROG books, CLAYMATES, MOTH & BUTTERFLY: Ta-Da! (Nancy Paulsen Books, June '21), HOW OLD IS MR. TORTOISE (Abrams '22), DON'T EAT BEES: LIFE LESSONS FROM HANK THE DOG (Doubleday '22) and more to come. She likes books that make you laugh a lot and think a little, sometimes the reverse.

Before becoming an author, Dev was a senior visual effects artist on The Matrix films and many others. Dev lives in her native San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughters, dogs, cat, and a snake named "Boots".

Photo by Feather Weight

Ana Aranda also illustrated The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra (by Marc Tyler Nobleman). She was born and raised in Mexico City, and completed her undergraduate studies in illustration in France. She now lives in San Francisco, where she has painted murals in the Mission District, for the Consulate General of Mexico, and for the prestigious de Young Museum. Her biggest inspirations are her childhood memories, the vibrant colors of Mexico, and music.

Look for Moth & Butterfly: Ta-Da! on June 8, 2021.