This is some pretty solid middle grade fiction. Lots of beetle facts for our future entomologists out there! It was a little slow starting for me, but once it picked up it was fine. And it's the first book in a planned trilogy.

Summary: Darkus Cuttle has taken care of his father ever since his mother died, but one day his father vanished from a locked vault at the Natural History Museum, and now he lives with his eccentric uncle--but one day he finds a large and unusually intelligent and self-aware beetle, and soon he and his two friends are caught up in a struggle to protect an intelligent super species of beetles.