Cheap The Butterfly (Book) (Patricia Polacco) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Butterfly

The best book ever!
Acquainting readers with holocaust history, The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco successfully maintains virtuosity to a war tale of sadness and tragedy while still exploring a delicate balance between the horrors of war and the childish innocence of two little girls cheerfully building a friendship. Based on the life experience of the author/illustrator's aunt Monique, the girl protagonist discovers that her family is hiding a Jewish family in her home.
Secretly meeting and playing together each night after the other members of the families sleep, Monique and Sevrine build a poetic friendship full of hope, happiness, and a childish energy that defies the boundaries between war cultures. After a neighbor catches sight of the girls playing too close to the window, the girls realize that the secret hiding place might be suspected. The plot races onward to an exciting climax as Monique and Sevrine must divulge not only their secret friendship but also the new danger to their parents. Escaping to a new hiding place, Sevrine's family is whisked away into the dark night of the unknown, while Monique hopes for her friend's safety. A symbolic butterfly fluttering through the French family's garden later assures Monique that her friend must be alive and safe. An author's note in the end pages assures readers that Sevrine did survive the holocaust-although her parents were not as fortunate.
The characters, while handled lightly in words, convey roundness in the authentic sense of emotions as they run the gamut of fear, comfort, hate, and love. Convincing as a memoir, The Butterfly successfully conveys the quiet strength of individuals amidst trial.
Perfect as a delicate and sophisticated handling of a cruel time in history, The Butterfly provides an appropriate way to dialogue with children about the uglier side of humanity-without crossing into the gruesome or blatantly shocking (although also true) stories of war that sometimes make war books inappropriate for younger children. The Butterfly provides allusions to war crimes that will be understood by older children while still providing an eye-opening tale of friendship to younger children. Targeting the age range of 6-9, The Butterfly adeptly provides insight into the beauty of life while describing life's fragility.
Known as the author/illustrator of numerous books including Pink and Say, Patricia Polacco's pencil and watercolor illustrations highlight the contrast between the cruel and the innocent. The dust jacket of the book is a perfect symbol of the juxtaposition between innocence and cruelty since the front side of the cover depicts irises, a butterfly, and a young girl with warm watercolor tones and delicate chiaroscuro while flipping the book over reveals a Nazi officer with a hard-set jaw and unseen eyes with a swastika banner depicted in harsh black, gray, and browns. Polacco's story is an important history while her illustrations make that history palatable and vivid to child and adult viewers. Experiencing The Butterfly means contemplating unsettling human history while savoring the security of friendship.

The Butterfly
I found "The Butterfly" a very interesting book because it not only shows how Jews, but how non-Jews lived in fear in World War II. It tells how the little girl, Monique, is afraid of the "tall black boots" in her small French village. The "tall black boots" refer to the Nazi officers. It is not until Monique's friend, Monsieur Marc, is beaten and taken away by the officers when Monique finds out why the Nazis are in her village. One night Monique encounters a little "ghost girl" in her room that teaches Monique that she is not the only one afraid of the War. The little "ghost girl" turns out to be a Jewish girl named Severine hiding with her parents in Monique's unknown basement. It turns out that Monique's mother was hiding this secret from her. One night when Monique and Severine are playing in Monique's room when a neighbor sees them. The girls tell Monique's mother that someone had saw Severine and that Monique and her mother will be in trouble if they continue to harbor Severine and her family. That night, Monique and her mother take Severine and her parents to safety and Monique ends up in trouble. Will she ever be safe?