An Usborne Beginners reader about the one transformation every young child wants explained. Short sentences, large type, and a photograph or a painted illustration on every page, so the life cycle is shown rather than described.

Lots of legs, across pages 8 and 9, gives a whole spread to a single emperor gum moth caterpillar, green and studded with orange and blue, walking a stem from one page onto the next, with the text pointing out that the front six legs are stiff for grabbing food while the back ones are fat and suckered for gripping the twig. Three small loopers at the foot show how a body stretches out and pulls its back end up to meet the front. A new body, on pages 16 and 17, has a monarch hanging from its split pupa with its wings spread and drying, and a blue box beside it notes that a butterfly does not grow after hatching and stays that size for life. What is a moth, on pages 20 and 21, sets an emperor moth with eyespots against a lemon yellow Madagascan moon moth trailing long tails, and adds two small panels, one on the fat furry bodies that keep moths warm on cold nights and one on the feathery feelers that sense objects in the dark.

Thirty two pages at about 6.1 by 8.3 inches, measured at Lexile 630L, written by Stephanie Turnbull and illustrated by Rosanne Guille and Uwe Mayer. Printed page numbers throughout, so a child can be sent to a page.

Paperback, 32 pages, 6.1 by 8.3 in (156 by 210 mm), from the Usborne Beginners series. Usborne Publishing Ltd., May 2025. ISBN-13 9781836050421. Publisher age guidance: 4 and up.

The same series takes on other subjects in Beginners: Weather and Beginners: Horses and Ponies. Two sticker books sit alongside it for a younger hand: Little First Stickers Butterflies and First Sticker Book Bugs.

Two more Usborne Beginners readers joined the shelf: Beginners: Trees, on how a tree feeds itself and who lives in one, and Beginners: Storms and Hurricanes, on lightning, dust storms and gales.