The Bad Butterfly: Billie B Brown by Sally Rippin

Hardie Grant Egmont, 2010. ISBN: 978 192156492 5
When best friends Billie and Jack begin ballet classes, the girls are to dance like delicate, fluttering butterflies and the boys as stomping trolls. When Billie isn't able to fulfill her role to the teacher's satisfaction, she and Jack begin to practice in earnest at home. They finally share their new found skills with the teacher.

This title is definitely best suited to the female emergent reader and, despite being extremely predictable to adults, could well be used in class to support a junior primary unit on either sex-role stereotyping or the importance of persistence and open-mindedness. The series is designed to fill a niche for girls who are just beginning to look for chapter books and are of a similar reading age to the boys who devour the Zac Power Test Drives. Print is of a large font and double-spaced and there are pictures interspersed with the text on approximately half of the pages. Aki Fukuoka's illustrations of Billie, depicting her as the cheeky tom-boy who appears to be full of a zest for life, are appealing and endearing. In the final line of the story, the reader is introduced to the likely topic for the next title in the series.
Jo Schenkel, Pilgrim School