Barbara Carroll Roberts

The Metamorphosis of Bunny Baxter

The Metamorphosis of Bunny Baxter

Bun­ny Bax­ter thinks noth­ing could be worse than start­ing sev­enth grade at a school where she knows no one. But after her first day, she real­izes things can actu­al­ly get much worse.

If Bun­ny Bax­ter were an insect, she’d have so many ways to slip through sev­enth grade unno­ticed. But she’s tall instead of tiny, has flam­ing red Medusa hair instead of cam­ou­flage, and she suf­fers from social anx­i­ety, which makes it hard to be part of a swarm. Worst of all, she’s been redis­trict­ed to a new mid­dle school away from her best friend who she could always hide behind when her anx­i­ety got the best of her.

The first day at E.D. Britt Mid­dle School does not go well. Bun­ny trips on the steps, falls into the cutest boy in the school, and caus­es a kid domi­no pile-up. At lunch, she unin­ten­tion­al­ly caus­es an uproar in the cafe­te­ria, which lands her and anoth­er girl in the principal’s office. Bun­ny decides there is only one option: to get expelled so she can trans­fer to the school her best friend attends.

She soon dis­cov­ers that it isn’t that hard to get in trou­ble — don’t turn in your home­work, walk around the track instead of run in P.E., pre­tend you delib­er­ate­ly hit some­one with a bad­minton birdie. What isn’t so easy for Bun­ny is real­iz­ing she now has a rep­u­ta­tion as a trou­ble­mak­er. And even more con­fus­ing, when it looks like her plan to get expelled might work, she’s no longer sure what to do.

The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Bun­ny Bax­ter is a heart­felt com­ing of age sto­ry about an insect-lov­ing girl who is learn­ing to grow into her­self — quirks and all.

Recognition

Junior Library Guild Gold Stan­dard selection

Reviews

“Some­times it feels like a mir­a­cle that we make it through mid­dle school. It real­ly does. And so it’s won­der­ful to have sto­ries like this one as our com­pan­ions — sto­ries about mak­ing mis­takes, los­ing and find­ing friends, dis­ap­point­ing our teach­ers and win­ning their respect, and feel­ing our­selves grow into the per­son we almost did not believe we could be. Read this. You’ll cheer for Bun­ny — and cry a bit too. And by the end, you’ll real­ize that she’s not the only one you’re cheer­ing and cry­ing for in these pages.” (Gary D. Schmidt, New­bery and Printz Hon­or Winner)

“You’ll cheer for Bun­ny Bax­ter in this spot-on mid­dle grade in which Bun­ny uses her pas­sion for pol­li­na­tors to grow a gar­den, friend­ships, and her voice.” (Kathryn Ersk­ine, Nation­al Book Award Winner)

Behind the Book

When I was in grad­u­ate school, work­ing on becom­ing a children’s writer, we had to write essays about dif­fer­ent aspects of children’s books. One of the oth­er stu­dents, a woman who’d been adopt­ed into her fam­i­ly and who sub­se­quent­ly adopt­ed her own chil­dren, wrote an essay about how few children’s books includ­ed a main char­ac­ter who’d been adopt­ed. And of the few that she found, most of them focused on the char­ac­ter search­ing for a birth par­ent. This stu­dent felt that there should be more books about kids who’d been adopt­ed. But more than that, these char­ac­ters should have more stories.

That is, there should be more books in which the main char­ac­ter hap­pened to have been adopt­ed into their fam­i­ly, but the fact of their adop­tion was not what the book was about. These char­ac­ters should have as many and as var­ied sto­ries as any­one else.

Since my hus­band and I had adopt­ed one of our chil­dren, I decid­ed to take on this chal­lenge. All I had to do was come up with a sto­ry. (No easy task for some­one who writes as slow­ly as I do.)

But then I start­ed think­ing about a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non that would soon occur where I live — the emer­gence of the sev­en­teen-year cicadas. This is a mas­sive brood of cicadas that live under­ground for sev­en­teen years in lar­val form, and then all at the same time, tun­nel up to the sur­face, climb the clos­est ver­ti­cal thing they find — trees, bush­es, lamp­posts — shed their last lar­val exoskele­ton, and emerge as fly­ing, singing, egg-lay­ing adults. Mil­lions and mil­lions of them, all at once.

cicadas

Many peo­ple find this phe­nom­e­non alarm­ing or dis­gust­ing or sim­ply way too loud, but I think it’s fas­ci­nat­ing. So I decid­ed to cre­ate a char­ac­ter who was equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by cicadas and incor­po­rate the emer­gence of the sev­en­teen-year cicadas into her story.

But as I was work­ing on ear­ly drafts of this book, some­thing else hap­pened. The Covid pan­dem­ic hit, and schools closed to pre­vent the dis­ease from spread­ing. Which meant that, in the spring of 2021 when the sev­en­teen-year cicadas emerged here in Vir­ginia, the kids in my book would be going to school online, not in their class­rooms. My sto­ry — a great deal of which takes place at Bunny’s school — fell apart.

praying mantis

For­tu­nate­ly, while research­ing cicadas I’d col­lect­ed a big stack of books and arti­cles about all kinds of insects. And as I learned more about them and their impor­tance in our world, I real­ized that Bunny’s inter­est in insects could expand along with mine.

There are still cicadas in this book, but they’re the reg­u­lar, annu­al vari­ety that tun­nel up from under­ground every sum­mer. I guess I’ll just have to wait until 2038 to put the sev­en­teen-year cicadas in a book.

a butterfly inserting its proboscis into the flower to extract food
The Metamorphosis of Bunny Baxter

Mar­garet Fer­gus Books /

Hol­i­day House, 2025

ISBN: 978–0‑823–45856‑1

Mid­dle-Grade Fiction

256 pages

Age Range: 9–14

Available July 22, 2025

Pre-order this book