A little girl has butterflies instead of hair. She wants to be like all the other children, but her mother assures her she is special. One night, the child dreams that her butterflies fly away. In the morning, she is happy to find this was a dream. Finally, she meets another child who has bottlecaps for hair. Each girl admires the other’s unique appearance, and they become friends.

This is the plot of this first picture book from Eliza Clark, whose writing for adults has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, and the Leacock Award. The manuscript must have presented a challenge to illustrator Vladyana Krykorka. Children without hair look alien to us, and connote distressing health problems. Krykorka handles this well though. The children look extraordinary, but not weird. The mainly pastoral backgrounds are colourful and the butterflies are quite remarkable in their beauty.

So why is this a book that doesn’t quite work? The action has a static quality that weighs the narrative down. Virtually all of the story is told either in third person narrative, or in dialogue between the child and her mother. We understand that the child interacts with other children, but, until the girl with bottlecaps enters in the last few pages, all that action is off stage. This feeling of stasis is heightened by the language, which is consciously unrealistic. The children, especially, do not sound like children, or at least not native English speakers from this century. Unfortunately, this gives the story the feeling of a badly translated folktale.

Children who interact primarily with their parents are preschoolers, younger than the two girls in this book. But since this is a book about making a first friend, preschoolers are probably the intended audience. The abstract qualities of concept and language in Butterflies and Bottlecaps will make this story difficult and confusing to small children. This is a book that misses its mark.