Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions

Written by Anjali Joshi

Illustrated by Kathleen Ng

Annick Press

978-1-834020310

128 pp.

Ages 8–12

March 2026 

 

The natural world has always astounded. From within its plant and animal species, its landforms, its waters, and environmental factors like weather come examples for processes that work for adaptation, communication, farming, and more. In Built Like a Bug, Anjali Joshi, a science educator, focuses on insects and reveals all the ways they inspire important inventions and developments.

From Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions, written by Anjali Joshi, illustrated by Kathleen Ng

The table of contents to Built Like a Bug demonstrates the complexity of the book's content. It looks at mosquitoes and cockroaches, spiders and leafhoppers, termites and fireflies, ants, hawk moths, dung beetles, and bees and dragonflies. The assortment of insects is only matched by the contributions they have made to innovative research and development.

From Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions, written by Anjali Joshi, illustrated by Kathleen Ng

In addition to providing basic scientific information like common and scientific names, life and size, Anjali Joshi highlights key features of their behaviour that should be noted. For example, information on how the mosquito effectively jabs an animal and prevents clotting is being used by researchers to reduce pain from needles and to develop synthetic anti-coagulants.

From Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions, written by Anjali Joshi, illustrated by Kathleen Ng

Silk from spiders is inspiring researchers to develop sutures for stitches, to deliver medicines, to create bullet-proof materials, and to investigate it as a building material.

From Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions, written by Anjali Joshi, illustrated by Kathleen Ng

Insects are models for farming, for electricity, for flight, for navigation, for medicine, and so much more. They can inform us about engineering and building robots, as well as about energy efficiency and dealing with trash. There is so much information in Built Like a Bug that any reader—or teacher—will be able to get both a broad overview of how insects inspire innovation and the finer points about insects themselves and the research and development they generate. Regardless of the complexity of information, Built Like a Bug is organized so well that it is a pleasure to delve into the material. Tidbits of interesting facts are posted in info boxes called "Bug Bites" and the illustrations by Toronto-based artist Kathleen Ng give colour and details to strengthen the information and to keep the text from becoming overwhelming. Her digital art is specific enough to help convey key information, but it is not so detailed that a middle grade reader would get bored.

From Built Like a Bug: How Insects Inspire Everyday Inventions, written by Anjali Joshi, illustrated by Kathleen Ng

I know kids will enjoy this book, especially those interested in STEM activities, but teachers will adore it. Not only is it a prime example of a non-fiction book for middle-grade readers, offering opportunities for learning and creativity, teachers will appreciate the variety of features, from the glossary, full index, and references to the numerous experiments and activities. Built Like a Bug will give young readers lots to think about and to do, perhaps inspire them to see more within the natural world.

 

Everyone Gets a Turn

Written and illustrated by Marianne Dubuc

Princeton Architectural Press

978-1-7972-2729-0

60 pp.

Ages 3-6

March 2024 

Turtle, Hare, Bear and Mouse are spending a beautiful day in the forest, when they discover an egg. They decide they will each take turns caring for it. 

From Everyone Gets a Turn, written and illustrated by Marianne Dubuc

At Mouse's house, a voice from within the egg declares that it is cold so Mouse hurries to remedy that. First, Mouse lays a fire and then he wraps the egg in a scarf and a hat. Mouse is very kind and accommodating,

The next day Mouse takes Little Egg to Bear's house. But Bear's lifestyle is a little more active, and while he exercises Little Egg cracks. Though it's apparently too tight inside the shell for Little Egg now, it needs a little help to get out. When Little Bird finally emerges, exhausted for her efforts, Bear offers comfort.

From Everyone Gets a Turn, written and illustrated by Marianne Dubuc

Then, it's on to Hare's house where the rabbit is surprised to see a bird, not an egg. But now Hare has to meet another need for their new ward: food. And though Hare has a stacked pantry, it's a bit of a mystery what Little Bird will eat.  

 

Finally Little Bird is taken to Turtle's place, a house of wonders. It’s filled with trinkets that have stories and that sparkle and that amaze Little Bird and make her dream.  

From Everyone Gets a Turn, written and illustrated by Marianne Dubuc

But when Turtle wakes up the next day, he is bereft that she is missing. All the friends are in tears, until they realize that Little Bird’s absence is just the next step in the bird’s development. Gone from one place, or four places, does not mean gone forever.

 

Each of the friends gets a turn with Little Egg/Little Bird and each excels at giving their ward exactly what she needs, whether it’s a little warmth, a little assistance in cracking the shell, sustenance, or the inspiration to dream. Like parents who must support and encourage their children until they are ready to become independent, the four friends learn to work together to be everything Little Egg/Little Bird needs until she can do for herself. And just because she has become independent, it doesn’t mean that she longer wants them in her life. Marianne Dubuc gives us a story that all parents will need to learn sometime in their children’s journey to adulthood. Her message is one of love and support but also the courage to let them fly and be their own selves. 

 

Marianne Dubuc has always created soft worlds, just as she did in On Baba's Back, Bear and the Whisper of the Wind, and Little Cheetah's Shadow. Like Beatrix Potter, who could see worlds and relationships within the animals of the natural world, Marianne Dubuc takes us into their homes, the forests, and the meadows with her subtle use of ink, watercolour, and coloured pencil. She shows us ourselves as we are or could be: friends, parents, children, good people. And she teaches sophisticated lessons of sharing and caring delivered by sweet creatures who are uniquely themselves, while being supportive and cooperative. And though a message about sharing and taking turns may seem paramount according to the title, Everyone Gets a Turn also speaks to the steps we all take in our development, going from needing to be nurtured to shifting to self-actualization.

This House is Home

Written by Deborah Kerbel

Illustrated by Yong Ling Kang

Owlkids Books

978-1-77147-380-4

32 pp.

Ages 4-8

March 2021

The concept of home has always been an important focus in literature: finding it, establishing it, cultivating it, holding onto it, and sadly even losing it. For some, it's ephemeral, fleeting in its nature, and for others it is the bedrock of life. For the families in This House is Home, it is both.

From This House is Home by Deborah Kerbel, illus. by Yong Ling Kang

Lily and her rabbit family live in a home that her grandmother says is "old and steady as mountains." But when a pair of suited foxes with clipboards approach Grandma about buying the house, she politely declines.

This house is home, and we'll live here for the rest of forever.

From This House is Home by Deborah Kerbel, illus. by Yong Ling Kang

Problem is that everyone else around them sells to the developers, and there is much upheaval as friends pack up and goodbyes are shared. And then the diggers arrive, flattening houses and trees, and constructing a road that like a "long gray tongue snaked toward our house, closer and closer, until it had pushed right up to our door. It didn't bother knocking."

From This House is Home by Deborah Kerbel, illus. by Yong Ling Kang

The construction workers might have placed pylons around their house but their house is now situated in the middle of a wide road of noisy, smelly vehicles racing past their windows. The impact on their garden was evident but also clear was the impact within their home: dirt, noise, irritability, and distress.

From This House is Home by Deborah Kerbel, illus. by Yong Ling Kang

But a solution to their problem comes to Lily, the artist, in a dream in which, "The road had melted into a sea. The cars had shrunken to fish. My house had grown sails." Their house would remain their home, just in a different location.

Having a development threaten your house, your home is a nerve-racking prospect. Undoubtedly it's a frustration of many whose abodes stand in the way of planning projects that look at the big picture and not the individual lives affected. The menace of the foxes' repeated efforts to get Grandma to sell are tangible, though she is always polite and gracious, but Deborah Kerbel's words focus on the calm and love inside the home and leaves the destruction and disquiet outside. Sadly, there comes a time when the outside encroaches on the inner sanctum of home. Still Grandma's strength of conviction that their house would remain steadfastly their home and Lily's problem-solving ensure that home will endure as such.

Illustrator Yong Ling Kang, who illustrated Tanna's Owl (2020), continues to charm with her watercolour art that adds the whimsy of a bunny family living in their home, having picnics, playing, knitting, and growing. She brightens those pages with all colours, saving the greys and browns for the mayhem of the construction, and gives fluidity to the story, indicative of the transitional nature of the house, with her brushstrokes and lines. As such, Yong Ling Kang's art echoes the joys and frustrations of Deborah Kerbel's characters from comfort through distress and back to buoyant.

This House is Home reminds us that home is more than a structure. It has roots that are grown of family, and, though it can change, as necessary, it carries the promise of steadfastness, even if in transition.