The Big Dreams of Small Creatures

Two kids at cross purposes intersect over insects in this environmentally invested novel from Black-ish writer and director Lerner. August, who cues as white and is often bullied at school, has big dreams of performing on stage. When a cockroach crawls into his costume during a school performance, though, Augie’s reaction results in him “shirtless and gasping” on the stage floor, and a fly landing in his mouth soon sees him vomiting on his favorite teacher. Vowing revenge on insect-kind, Augie seeks a mysterious man rumored to have engineered a powerful pesticide. Meanwhile, anxious budding entomologist Eden, who has a white Jewish mother and a Black father, saves a wasp nest and finds that she can speak with the wasp queen via kazoo. Told of a school that focuses on communication between humans and insects, Eden begins a search for it, leading to the kids’ connection. Expository third-person prose can sometimes feel heavy-handed, but the alternating arcs invest readers in a world where curiosity leads to discovery, empathy proves a key ingredient in multiple kinds of conflict, and interspecies bonding is portrayed as key to global survival. Ages 10–up. (Oct.)