It is refreshing to read a book for young children that neither sugarcoats animal survival nor anthropomorphizes animal parenting.

Just as she existentially anthropomorphizes the mouse and empathizes with its maternal responsibilities, she ruminates on the question of the commonalties and differences between a dead chicken and a dead man, thus investing a sort of shared humanity between the two: "And yet the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity.

She sometimes anthropomorphizes so that the reader becomes a butterfly, and at other times looks at butterflies through the eyes of a 19th-century collector or a 21st-century scientist.