How can you not feel encouraged when you come across a children's book that features a whole ecosystem as its main character? Through their imaginative connection with this book's central tree and its creatures, readers experience how fully alive and interconnected each portion of nature's web is.
The book's set-up, as a series of short stories about individual creatures, lets the theme sink in organically, aided by delightfully droll and whimsical writing with just the right dash of shivery eeriness in a few places. In one story, a Common Toad feels compelled to tell a Duck-Billed Platypus all the ways in which he is uncommon, prompting her to do the same in an amusing escalation of pride. In another, a sympathetic spider loves to weave perfect webs but releases his prey, even when his stomach has something else to say about the matter. Then there's a brown bear who decides to sleep in during the Spring, an aphid who sort of accidentally eats her brother, and an owl who learns that he can decide for himself who he is.
These creatures and many more live in the embrace of the eponymous Tree That Was a World. "In his branches," observes Dutch writer and music composer Yorick Goldewijk, "you got lost in no time. You could gaze endlessly at the vistas with hundreds of shades of green. You could stroll for hours along paths of bark, past knots and veins and puddles of dew."
Jeska Verstegen complements these stories with art that captures the creatures' experiences: The bark of a tree blurs past as a snail tumbles from a high branch; a barn swallow who learns to find home in the heart now sweeps through the skies with a translucent spirit house fitted over her body.
Readers ages eight to 14 will find these engaging stories just right for reading a little at a time or in a cover-to-cover binge. They may even recognize bits of themselves in the foibles and fortunes of the creatures featured and so get a chance to reflect on their choices of who and how to be.
