ROOTED

An established forest tree mentors a seedling in Cranston’s picture book.

The author drops the reader into an ongoing story (the book is part of her Rooted series) in which the first-person narrator is a mature forest tree, depicted with eyes, eyebrows, a nose, and a mouth. It enjoys interacting with the surrounding fauna and the proximity of human children who come to explore and play (“Being with others gives me a sense of belonging and purpose”). Two frequent visitors are Big Brother and Little Sister, elementary-school-aged kids with dark hair and salmon-hued skin. Their presence draws a nostalgic response as the tree remembers its own younger days. Less endearing are the adults who carve their initials into the tree’s trunk, or the worker in the hardhat who marks the tree for cutting down. With this dire fate hanging over it, the tree serves as mentor to a seedling approaching its “Seed to Tree” coming-of-age ceremony. Cranston alternates text-heavy but straightforward narrative pages with autumnally hued, airbrushed digital illustrations that are more serviceable than truly artistic. Mostly, these pictures present variations on the same scene featuring the tree, the sapling, and ghostly background trees—but the human characters and a changing menagerie of animals do provide sufficient points of difference. The narrator is likeable both in thought and expression, and serves ably to represent the living forest.

A gentle story that will encourage young readers to think more deeply about the natural world.