Jonathan Case: Hello, I'm Jonathan Case. I'm the author and illustrator of Little Monarchs. I started this book many years ago before I was a parent with the idea that I wanted to do a book to engage my brain and what it would be like to have a kid and what kind of a parent would I be? I had all those typical anxieties that you do before you have kids. I chose Monarch butterflies as a subject because they're migratory, and I thought if I could follow their migration routes, that would be a good incentive to see some new parts of the world and learn about something that I didn't know about already. So that's sort of how it began. And then I had kids, and I was still working on the book. Then I lost one of my children when he was only two, and I was still working on the book so it began as a book for the children I didn't have, then it was a book for the children I did have, and then it sort of became a book for the child I lost, and it's still all of those things and I ended up putting my son, Otis, into the book in an indirect way, as a way to help me remember his mannerisms and little things that he would say. I really enjoyed the process of working on the book even though it was so challenging and it did take so long.

So one of my challenges with this book was I wanted it to be informative and have a lot of fascinating science in there, but I didn't want it to be dull, and I didn't want it to pull readers out of the story. I wanted to find a way to feel like you were just sort of learning alongside of friends, like these characters would be your friends and you were experiencing these same things together with them so I did that partly by creating journal entries from this little girl, Elvie, who's my lead character, where she would have to do some schoolwork, and she would have commentary about how maybe she doesn't want to do that particular thing for her schoolwork that day but the biologist she's traveling with, to keep her occupied and kind of to help raise her up, gives her these assignments that are based in what the scientist knows, which is naturalist illustration, science, some literature, and it mirrored my own homeschool experience a bit growing up as a kid, and it also allowed me ways to put science into the book through these blocks of red text that Elvie writes. Whenever she's writing something that she thinks this is probably true, she writes it in red and it's also a cue for the reader to know, oh, this is a science fact because it's in red, and then there's other places where maybe a character ties a knot, and you have a little breakout series of panels right underneath that moment in the story that shows you how to tie that knot. Or a character's might be describing some element of star navigation like, "Oh, do you see the North Star there?" And "If you hold your fist up, you can lower it one fist size and that's every 10 degrees until you get to the horizon and you can get position on a map that way." And I tried to come at it every way that I could, as long as it didn't feel too forced.

One of the things that I hope kids take from this book is the sense that it's full of the real world that surrounds them and that they can enter into and discover that real world for themselves and really claim it as their own, be refreshed by it, be excited by it and that's why I chose to put in those compass headings and coordinates throughout the book so you can follow the characters step-by-step through all of these real places.