Tilly & Thandeka: The Butterfly Spy

by Nicole Rimensberger, Cristy Zinn (Illustrator)

Tilly and Thandeka are two friends with a talent for solving mysteries. They know that having adventures means sticking together, thinking on your feet, being brave even if you are scared, and most importantly, trusting your instincts when you meet someone suspicious. Their next adventure takes them into the amazing world of butterfly collecting at the Coastal Museum and becomes a race against time to save a rare butterfly. They quickly figure out that there is a spy in their midst, but what if no one else believes them?

56 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 2, 2020

Reviews

[Angela Tuson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked aspects of this but just couldn't get past the butterflies caught, killed and impaled with pins to boards as 'valuable'. Surely anyone is more valuable alive, living their life, in their own environment? So although it's a museum story, and set in South Africa, and there are too few of either of those, it would have been a MUCH better story if the girls had seen butterflies, looked them up in a book/done some research, photographed them, kept the actual butterflies (not their broken bodies) safe from the baddy, or kept the research safe from plagiarism, that sort of thing.

I would not recommend this to children because 'Teaching a child to not step on the caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.'

Pity about that disrespect for wildLIFE - it would have been ok otherwise, and the illustrations were well done.