The Bug Club

Surely all those bugs deserve to be acknowledged in an approachable book for children, and Elise Gravel has written and illustrated a fine example of one with The Bug Club.

The author, channelling her childhood self, speaks in the first person to point up her own long-standing interest in bugs and to give readers some general information about them. Scientists who study bugs are called entomologists; bugs are part of the larger group of animals called invertebrates; and bugs can be identified by their physical traits, including their many different antenna and wing shapes. (Four pages of ‘fun bug facts’ appear later in the book. Did you know that butterflies smell with their feet?)

Next come pages that discuss particular bugs, from familiar ones like the praying mantis to the microscopic, and thus unseen, tardigrade. There is a whole section that talks about beetles, for example, the dung beetle:

This one is a pretty fun beetle. They eat poop. The one I drew here
is a roller dung beetle, which means they roll their provision of poop
in a big ball they can push around. They will bury it somewhere to eat
as a snack or for the female to lay her eggs in.

The dung beetle might be tiny, but in relation to their size they’re the
strongest insect on Earth! They can push around a ball that’s
1000 times their own weight. If you were as strong as a dung beetle,
you would be able to drag six double-decker buses along the road.

That is a lot of information to pack into two brief pages, and the comparison of the beetle’s strength to that of the child reader makes the point so well.

The illustrations use a flat-looking paint technique that resembles tempera in dull colours of rust, mustard, brown and black to depict all kinds of anthropomorphized bugs with googly eyes and friendly smiles, standing out against an unadorned white ground. One of the few spreads in which readers get a sense of the bugs in some kind of habitat is the one where Gravel confesses to enjoying drawing underground scenes and shows bugs as varied as a cicada and an earthworm in burrows below the earth’s surface. There is also a problem with understanding scale as, in most cases, the bugs are shown in isolation and take up a whole page. I certainly hope never to meet a stink bug that is 6 inches long.

Although the creatures included are in the main fanciful and cartoonish in their aspect, the artist has managed to include some detail in showing legs, wings and carapaces that are true to the real insects. At the end, Gravel lets her imagination go in creating some new bugs, such as “the cowboy beetle” and “the scarlet hopcricket”.

The somewhat scattershot arrangement of the book will limit its use for school assignment research, but for any child (or adult) who wants to know more about bugs, The Bug Club is a worthwhile addition to school and public library shelves.