2015 Finalist: Middle Grades Science Book

Handle With Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey, by Loree Griffin Burns. Photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz. Millbrook Press, 2014.

You may have seen the butterfly life cycle before in books, but never quite like this. How do you raise a butterfly? Award-winning team Burns and Harasimowicz take readers to a butterfly farm in Costa Rica and show how it’s done. Stunning photographs and informative, engaging text show how workers care for these delicate, winged creatures as they change from eggs to caterpillars to pupae. Like any other crop, the butterflies will eventually leave the farm. But where will they go? And just how do you ship a butterfly? Very carefully! To discover how it works, follow these butterflies on a remarkable journey!

About the Author

Loree Griffin Burns, Author:

Loree’s first career was as a research scientist (she holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry), and so it is not surprising that her writing celebrates the natural world and the people who study it. Her first book for young people, Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion, was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 2007 and received several honors, including a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book award, an ALA Notable Book designation, and an International Reading Association Children’s Book Award. It was also a finalist for the 2008 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize.

Loree lives in central Massachusetts with her husband and their three children and regularly visits schools, libraries, and book festivals to share her research, her books, and her passion for discovery.

Ellen Harasimowicz, Photographer:

Ellen Harasimowicz is a freelance photographer from Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and Audubon Adventures among others. Ellen teamed up with children’s author Loree Griffin Burns to illustrate The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe published in May 2010 by Houghton Mifflin. Before photography became her passion, Ellen spent 15 years as a graphic designer. She has self-published several books through blurb.com after recent travels to Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. Her most recent self-published book is an eight-year photographic essay titled John Olson: Maine Lobsterman about an 88-year-old lobster fisherman in Cushing, Maine. He is also the nephew of Christina Olson, the subject of the renowned 1948 painting by Andrew Wyeth titled Christina’s World. Ellen has a B.A. in psychology with a studio art minor from Mount Holyoke College.