ANT STORY

A small leafcutter ant with a flair for dramatic recitations squires a new friend through a fantastically dangerous rain forest world.

Being a “cartoon ant” who can talk (and talk), Rubi has had a lonely time of it. Her larger, nonverbal ant sisters scurry busily about cutting up leaves and cultivating underground fungus gardens rather than paying her (or even her melodramatic accounts of ant colony life) any mind. That all changes, though, when Rubi meets an ant who likewise talks but seems newly awakened and unaware that there are “a gajillion ways to die out here.” The breathless ensuing odyssey provides quick and continuing proof of the danger, with the two barely surviving threats from swarming army ants and a chameleon’s (as Rubi puts it) “DEATH TONGUE!” to voracious antlions and a gut-slurping assassin bug. Not to mention serious friction when Rubi’s ballad about a type of parasitic fly that lays its eggs in ant bodies to hatch, feed, and grow (“Once there was a horrid phorid / flying in the sky…”) gets an unexpectedly strong reaction from her mysterious new acquaintance. The development of the pair’s improbable bond becomes a storyline every bit as enthralling as the teeming, vividly depicted tropical milieu, with its rich arrays of intricate, clearly laid-out biological cycles and patterns. Bright red Rubi is easy to track through the graphic panels’ luxuriant and otherwise accurately detailed flora and fauna.

A must-read for lovers of ants, ecosystems…and unlikely friendships.