When Houston's Rain and Flooding Are Good Things

by Kim D.

It's literally been raining cats and dogs in Texas. Torrential rains and high winds finally hit in the Houston area Sunday night. In the wee hours Monday morning, an echoing boom signaled that a transformer had blown which sent my husband into a mad scramble for flashlights and candles. Shortly thereafter my phone began humming with school closure texts.

Unprepared to entertain my 6-year-old son in a home with no power, we played tons of games and made Lego creations. By mid-morning my bag of tricks was empty. Not wanting to venture out and risk navigating flooded areas, I went through the latest batch of books we bought at the last school book fair.

Willing to read and be read to for awhile, my son insisted on one that I had been avoiding: Battle Bugs: The Lizard War. The cover made me do another mental eye roll, but if it would entertain the kiddo for awhile, I was game. What I soon discovered was that this literary creation by Jack Patton was brilliant.

This is the first book in a series which explores the bug and lizard world and introduces species of which many probably have never heard. The story begins simply with a boy who loves bugs. His mother, who works for an estate auction house, finds an old insect encyclopedia and brings it home to her son, the only person she thinks could possibly appreciate the ancient tome.

Max, the budding entomologist, loves the book, especially when he discovers it includes an old magnifying glass. When he uses it to read the fine details of the map of Bug Island featured in the encyclopedia, a strange thing happens: his head begins to swirl, along with his stomach. Once he shakes off the dizziness, he is shocked to find himself shrunk to the size of a cockroach and in the middle of a jungle.  He soon realizes he has been magically transported to Bug Island.

He, of course, meets all kinds of bugs who he eventually befriends and learns are in the middle of a huge war with the inhabitants of Lizard Mountain who are trying to take over the island and make the bugs their new culinary delight. Although interesting and entertaining, the story line is not the best feature of the series. As we reached chapter three and were introduced to the insects, my son would stop me to ask what kind of bug was being described.

I didn't know but thanks to my iPhone and YouTube, we soon began searching for and finding tons of videos which gave us the information we sought. One of the first insects Max meets is named Spike - an emperor scorpion, who takes him to meet Bug Island's leader, Barton, a titan beetle. Along the way they encounter many other species, like a trapdoor spider:



My son thought this spider was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. Well, he did until we made it through a few more chapters and began the search to discover what exactly was the leader of Lizard Mountain - General Komodo, a monitor lizard. However, it was the introduction of the lizard spies, chameleons, that really made my son's heart flutter.  I think it was love at first sight, and the battle is now on to wear me and my husband down to by him a new pet like this:



So, the rain keeps falling and the roads are still flooding, but thanks to my son's insistence we buy the set of Battle Bug books, we have tons of reading material and bug and lizard discoveries to entertain us. I just hope my data plan can survive another power outage which could possibly come any minute as the sky rumbles and the winds begin, yet again, to swirl.