A wildfire threatens the monarch butterflies. One of them, Sokar, sets out to get help and meets the Lowriders, Lupe, Elirio and Flapjack. Sokar opens their eyes to the pollution in the environment and what monarchs need to survive. The Lowriders set out to revamp an abandoned rec center and make it a green-themed community center. They hope this will convince developers to see the business sense of going green and that it will also help the monarchs survive. There are a lot of other things going on in this lively graphic novel: Flappy gets new glasses and has a crush on Sokar. Lupe engineers the lowrider to be solar-powered. One of the developers is a Trump-alike until he sees the light of day. Sokar and her butterfly family speak Arabic which provides an opportunity to show the similarities of Arabic and Latino cultures. The idealism is over the top and finding a solution to climate change happens very quickly. But the energetic Lowriders stir the imagination in this take on the effects of climate change. ( )

Little bit cute; whole lotta preachy. I'm not sure I'd have been into this one at all when I was a kid. There were some interesting parts (the octopus needing glasses to help see the color red, for instance), and the language exchanges in Spanish, Arabic, and a few others were fun, even if after a while it started to feel cumbersome to keep checking the bottom of the page. The environmental message, though, was so heavy-handed that it overshadowed everything else and robbed the story of a lot of its lightheartedness. Not my cup of tea. ( )