Gotta Go! Gotta Go!

Rating:
Summary: More than just a children's book
Review: Gotta Go! Gotta Go! is more than just a book about the life of a monarch butterfly as the book reviewers suggest. It is a wonderful book that can be interpreted several different ways. It is much like Dr. Seuss' Oh, the Places You'll Go! It is for that adult who lives their life on an instinct that they can't explain to anyone else and sometimes, not even to themselves. I purchased it for my thirty-something year old sister who had the burning desire to move to Texas for her Ph.D. internship and couldn't explain why. On the other hand, it is a great children's book about the life of a monarch butterfly and if your child gets nothing more out of it than that well that's ok too.

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: Gotta' Go, Gotta' Go is a wonderful book about a monarch caterpillar and his lifelong "journey." I am a nature center director and we use this book to teach about the magnificent monarch migration. The book is entertaining, fun to read out loud, and best of all, factual.

Eric Carle's book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, is a cute book, but he did us all a disservice when he wrote that butterflies come out of cocoons. Butterflies hatch out of chrysalis, moths hatch out of cocoons. This book by Sam Swope has the correct information.

You'll love it, your kids will love it, and your kid's science teachers will love it when your child already knows one of the major differences between butterflies and moths.

Rating:
Summary: Gotta go get this great book!
Review: I bought this book for my niece and she loves it. I've since bought it and Mr. Swope's other books, The Crazees and The Araboolies of Liberty Street, as gifts for all the young people in my life. Mr. Swope's books educate in a wonderfully playful way and the illustrations really help bring his words to life. My niece and I can't wait for the next one!

Rating:
Summary: Gotta Get!
Review: I love Gotta Go Gotta Go. The books brings laughter and joy to children. I look forward to reading it to my children and grandchildren. Congratulations Sam Swope!!

Rating:
Summary: Gotta Read! Gotta Read!
Review: Seeing the world through a child's eyes is an act of transformation and intelligence.Bravo to Mr. Swope and Ms Riddle for creating a story worth telling, worth dwelling on. The utter spareness and beautiful simplicity of this story is a breath of fresh air in the midst of so much crassness and Disneyfied commercialism about nature. I imagine Fred Rogers using it as the centerpiece of one of his shows because he knows that good stories inhabit both the literal and the metaphoric world: Gotta Go teaches a child about the life cycle of the monarch but it also lays seeds for thinking about our own yearnings and desires and helps us parents talk about these issues with our kids.

Rating:
Summary: Cute as a bug
Review: This is a simple and charming story of a caterpiller with an urge to travel to Mexico. Her neighboring animals tease her (it's too far), but she recedes into her cocoon, emerging as a beautiful monarch butterfly, and proves them all wrong by flying south.

The story has a winsome sing-song refrain ("I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go to Mexico!") that children will love, and simple engaging line drawings. I'm impressed that the basic science in the story is accurately presented - the stages of the butterfly's life, its migration, its mating (gingerly and sweetly handled as a "dance" between butterflies) and its eventual return home.

My daughter loved this so much we donated a copy to her pre-school, where they watch monarch butterflies hatch in a terrarium every year. A big hit with the 3-to-5-crowd!

Rating:
Summary: Cute as a bug
Review: This is a simple and charming story of a caterpiller with an urge to travel to Mexico. Her neighboring animals tease her (it's too far), but she recedes into her cocoon, emerging as a beautiful monarch butterfly, and proves them all wrong by flying south.

The story has a winsome sing-song refrain ("I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go to Mexico!") that children will love, and simple engaging line drawings. I'm impressed that the basic science in the story is accurately presented - the stages of the butterfly's life, its migration, its mating (gingerly and sweetly handled as a "dance" between butterflies) and its eventual return home.

My daughter loved this so much we donated a copy to her pre-school, where they watch monarch butterflies hatch in a terrarium every year. A big hit with the 3-to-5-crowd!

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: This is one of the best children's books I have read in a long time...my kid's love hearing it and I don't tire of reading it again and again....

Wonderful because it tells a true 'nature story' in such a whimsical way.