Wings of Light

Bruce Hiscock's luminous, almost staggeringly beautiful watercolor illustrations highlight this story about the migration of a yellow butterfly from the Yucatan forests to a Vermont farm. Hiscock's mastery of light, form, and composition help us discover new ways of looking at the butterfly's long jouney. He reveal the jungle's abstract color designs, the Gulf of Mexico's blue waters--dappled with scores of yellow-winged shapeds, and the brilliance of the flowers that provide food and nesting grounds. Hiscock treats us to bright delphimiums and bromeliads, wild ponies running over Assateague Island, Maryland, and a startling trail of pure yellow that's actually a stream of butterflies beginning their flight over the Gulf. The prose is rhythmic, but Swinburne's grand style sometimes tries too hard; that is, it begins to sound overwritten: "The next morning, the forest, from mossy floor to canopy, moves in flashes of yellow wings." "The bromeliad with a notch in it's wing perches on a bromeliad living on the branch of a fig tree." Some sentences are too long, or too illiterative: "Many of them fly to feed on the forest flowers." Some readers will enjoy these lush poetic sounds; however, I found them distracting, and the language may be somewhat too complex for toddlers. There's also one annoying mismatch of text and illustration. We read that "a yellow butterfly with a notch in its wing, sliced by a bird's beak," flutters by, but the butterfly (the one we follow throughout the book from its initial flight to its tired Disney-like "cycle of life" ending) is a small speck in the background, it's confusing bird-sliced notch barely visible. Generally, however, the book presents an oooh- and ahhhh-inspiring narrative of the long migration path. There's a migration map part way through (although it shows only the USA leg of the migration; Central America is out of the picture),and an afterward which ponders--without directly answering--how such a small insect can make a trip of thousands of miles. By far, the best part of the book, unusually good, in fact, are the gripping watercolors of Mr. Hiscock. I think the book is most appropriate for older grade-schoolers who can understand the text, and who have some library skills to do further research. 29 pages (including frontispiece and afterward), on high quality paper, from Boyds Mills Publishing.