When The Monarchs Fly

"An insightful tale…. Beautifully illustrated." — The SandPaper

Set in Cape May, NJ, When the Monarchs Fly, by Robert J. Myers, is a story that relates to a child’s sense of place and security — and to a wondrous natural phenomenon that is all about movement.

In this endearing story for young readers, a girl who lives in one of North America’s most famous stopping-off points for migratory butterflies poignantly identifies with a late-season Monarch. It involves the complexity of human emotions that the young feel at times more deeply than adults, but cannot express.

The story follows the rough tide of the emotions of a girl named Ellie who overhears a conversation about the possible move of her family. An only child, she keeps the information to herself. Feeling she will have to leave the only home she has ever known — the quaint, fishing community of Cape May — she is overwhelmed. The familiar return of the monarchs at the end of every summer becomes more than a mysterious act of nature to her, but something she must soon give up.



When the Monarchs Fly includes nine illustrations by fine artist Cricket McGehee that capture the fishing community and, most of all, Ellie and her connection to the Monarch with tattered wings. It’s a poignant story written with an understanding of the workings of the mind of a young girl, and in the end, the needed coming together of family.



The book includes an endnote of natural history information about monarch butterflies: the transformation from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis and finally to butterfly, and their amazing migration.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Autumn
Monarch
Left Behind
The Raft
Lost
The Costume
Black and Orange
Halloween
Home

From Chapter One - "Autumn"

Of all the seasons of the year, Ellie would miss early Autumn the most. For that was when all the winged creatures came through Cape May on their long flight south. There were the seabirds who crowded the shorelines to eat their fill of small crabs, fattening and strengthening themselves to fly to Central or South America. There were high-flying hawks who brought a sense of sky-dazzle, of sky-danger. There were the neon blue and green dragonflies, zigging and zagging through the pretty yards of the old seaside resort. Old timers called them the devil's sewing needles and said that if you weren't careful, they'd sew your mouth shut. But, most pleasing of all to Ellie, were the Monarch butterflies. She thought they were the prettiest, the gentlest of all the migrators. In early September the first of them could be seen, bringing in their train thousands and thousands more, like a loose cloud stretching out over hundreds of miles. Their wings were a strong bright orange, sharply divided by curving strokes of black. People said that they looked like the stained glass windows in a church. But Ellie thought that that wasn't right. Stained glass windows were too still, there was no movement to them.

To Ellie, everything about the Monarchs spoke of movement. She loved their crazy flight, that slow, graceful, jerky path they took through the air. They were like leaves falling, falling and catching themselves, rising and then falling again. It was as if they lived in a world where there were no straight lines. Only swoop and fall and glide and rise. When a Monarch flew through her own backyard, Ellie would run beside it and pretend she was one of them. She flapped her arms and she rose on tiptoe, then suddenly she would fall low, almost to her knees, twisting and duck-walking till she rose again with a happy cry. Often she got so dizzy she fell to the ground laughing.

In the few weeks that they sheltered in and around Cape May, the Monarchs clustered on the bushes and small trees. They were so thick that the bushes seemed to have changed color; their wings fluttered and the bushes seemed on fire. Then, when their time in Cape May was up, these frail creatures would head out over Delaware Bay toward their destination far to the south. To Ellie they seemed so brave. To go on that journey of a thousand miles, over sea and mountain and swamp and city!