Tail Tale! Tad by Benjie Davies

TAD WAS A FROG. WELL, SHE WAS ALMOST A FROG.

She was so small that she had to wiggle her tail twice as fast as anyone else to keep up.

Her tadbrothers and tadsisters warned her that she had to stay with the group...

OR BIG BLUB WILL GET YOU!

BIG BLUB WAS A BIG, NASTY FISH WHO SWAM IN THE DEEP, DARK, MURKY PART OF THE POND. HE WAS AS OLD AS MUD, THEY SAID.

They all said that he waited for a cloudy time when the pond turned gray... and then...

HE GLIDED OUT FROM THE DARK AND...  GULP!

Tad didn't want to think about Big Blub, so she stayed with the tadsisters and tadbrothers in the shallow, sunny parts of the pond.

But Tad noticed that her friends were growing longer legs, longer than hers, and their tails were getting shorter and shorter, much shorter than hers. And she noticed that each night when they gathered together in their leaf bed, there were fewer and fewer of them. Where did the others go?

SHE DIDN'T LIKE TO THINK.

And then her last tadbrother was gone.

Tad was alone and lonely. She was smart and knew where to find places to hide, but then one day...

THERE WAS BIG BLUB!

Tad knew she had to swim up, up, up and up, the fastest she had ever swum to the top. She made it to a rock at the edge of pond and used her new legs to clamber up on top of it.

Big Blub was out of luck and sank down into the murky depths where he belonged, and Tad's long legs tingled as she made the great leap to join her frogsisters and frogbrothers on land.

Benji Davis' Tad (Harper, 2020) is an appealing tale of metamorphosis, a universal story of waiting for your own time to come.

Tad is the plucky little runt of the bunch, and Big Blug is the big blobby bully we love to hate, as Tad makes the long leap to maturity just in the nick of time. Author Benji Davies builds tension as Tad waits while her friends lose their tails and leave her behind, while illustrator Davies uses the transition from the murky depths to the sunny shallows to the bright colors of the land, moving from brown-green to aqua to the vibrant reds and pinks of life on land in an artistic tour-de-force that supports his theme perfectly. Says Publishers Weekly, "With firm command of his artwork and his pacing, Davies weds keen suspense to the slow, difficult process of waiting for milestones."

Meta-What? The Very Impatient Caterpillar by Ross Burdach

Caterpillar #1: "Hey! What are you doing?"

Caterpillar #2: "We're going to metamorphosize... transform into butterflies."

Caterpillar #1: "Right. Right. I knew that. WAIT! Meta-WHAT!

You're telling me I can become a butterfly?"

Caterpillar #2 patiently points out that that's what caterpillars DO. They spin a chrysalis around their little many-legged bodies and metamorphose into six-legged, winged butterflies.

At first Caterpillar #1 can't get the hang of that spinning thing, but finally he manages to make himself a fairly decent chrysalis hanging side by side with his buddy. He's excited. Is he meta-whated yet? Caterpillar #2 patiently explains that it takes a couple of weeks and patience to change into a butterfly.

"TWO WEEKS??"

Can he go get a comic book to read? What if he needs a potty break? What if he gets hungry? He pulls out his phone.

"Hello? Two pizzas, please.

My address? A chrysalis.

Hello? Hellooo?"

Halfway though Day 1, Caterpillar #1 is going stir crazy.

There's nothing to do in there and he's getting claustrophobic! Surely he's done by now! KA-POW! He rips off his chrysalis, Superman-style.

WAIT! Where are my wings?

But Mother Nature takes her time, and Caterpillar #1 returns to his chrysalis and decides it's time for mind over matter. OMMMMM!

"Become One with the Chrysalis."

There's nothing for it but to go with the flow, in Ross Burdach's preternaturally funny The Very Impatient Caterpillar (Scholastic Press, 2019).  It's a picture book that has it all, a slice of primary-grade nature science, terrific comic art, and a bit of  a life lesson in patience. Burdach's quirky back-and-forth banter makes this one a dandy read-aloud in the best tradition of Darleen Cronin's classic Diary of a Worm and Tedd Arnold's Hi! Fly Guy,. Burdach's clever cartooning chops make this one a laugh-out-loud delight, one that will engage sophisticated story-time-savvy second and third graders, who will also find this one the bee's knees for reading solo.