Along the way, they meet a cast of wonderfully original characters, from King Seaweed and his army of tiny water-creature Scientists (whose data, inscribed on their bodies, tells of Earth’s climate through the ages) to “the Old One,” Earth herself.
#Narrator for growing up animal series#
The orphaned Louise and Merwin embark on a series of epic adventures - they’re washed into the ocean, wafted by a volcano, eaten, abandoned, rescued. The Ambassadors’ warning comes just in time for Mama to release her children into the air before she is engulfed in flames. The Ambassadors’ “vast underground system with millions of miles of tiny fibers” connecting all the trees “like an endless river of knowledge” reflects Susan Simard’s discoveries about what is now called “the wood-wide web.” Another clue about “Big Tree’’: It is rooted in science. The peace of the opening moments, with drawings of the sky, seed pods and trees, is broken when Mama receives a warning from the Ambassadors, which as the afterword notes are the fungal “internet” of the forest. These are clues about this fiction’s territory: Louise and Merwin are not human children but the seeds of a giant tree, Mama, growing in a prehistoric world. The novel begins with Louise wondering if she can fly to the moon once she gets her “wings,” and Merwin trying to explain to her what a metaphor is. Or at least that is the belief of its main characters, dreamy Louise and her practical brother Merwin. In BIG TREE (Scholastic, 528 pp., $32.99, ages 7 and up), written and exquisitely illustrated by Brian Selznick ( “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”), animals cannot talk.
“When I run,” Johannes says, “I pull at the earth and make it turn.” But it is in the way Johannes speaks about his greatest passion that Eggers ( “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) shows he has done the imaginative work required to bring us closer to an animal perspective. He is fascinated by the odd things humans do: An outdoor exhibition captivates him and he is drawn to the “rectangles” hanging in a mysterious new building. He has an insatiable appetite for racing anything that moves and the requisite prejudice against ducks. Johannes is a highly engaging narrator whose exuberance and good nature run like a bright thread through the novel’s pages. He is “the Eyes” of the park and reports to the Bison, who keep “the Equilibrium”: “When there was a new road cutting through the forest … I told the Bison and they decided where and when the raccoons needed to relocate.” His warm, comedic tale of interspecies friendship and the plotting of an “impossible” escape for three venerable Bison who live in a “large fenced-in park within the park” is told by Johannes, a dog. The experience of Eggers’s animals is limited to a small island park patrolled by human rangers and regularly awash with visitors. They made me think of the eccentric way 7-year-olds construct theories and make decisions based on their own limited experience of the world around them.
And, most crucially, no animals symbolize people.” While Eggers’s animals use human language with great facility, he bestows on them the essence of their animal natures. McSweeney’s wood-bound hardcover, $28 Knopf cloth, $18.99 ages 8 and up), Dave Eggers says of his characters, “No animals are real animals. In the foreword to THE EYES & THE IMPOSSIBLE (256 pp. The authors of “The Eyes & the Impossible” and “Big Tree” have avoided this pitfall and created characters who, although they speak with a human tongue, embody the strange magic of other beings. But if the author’s understanding of other species is superficial, the characters’ nonhuman features become little more than a means to deliver jokes. Many children’s authors create animal and plant characters who talk and think like humans.
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