The Last Tree

by HarperCollins Publishers

Overview

"[A] thought-provoking picture book."
—Guardian

This second picture book from Waterstones Children's Book Prize nominee Emily Haworth-Booth is an eco-fable with the feel of an instant classic, while also being topical in the current environmental and political climate.

The story follows a group of friends seeking a place to call home. The desert was too hot, the valley too wet, and the mountain too windy, but the forest was perfect. The friends soon wanted to build shelters, which became large houses. All too soon they wanted to control the environment and built a huge wooden wall around the community, which shut out the wind, but also created problems. And gradually the forest became thinner, until there was only one last tree standing. It was down to the children to find a solution...

"Beautifully executed ... it shows how much a simple story can convey."
—The Sunday Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843654841
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/06/2020
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Emily Haworth-Booth is an award-winning author, illustrator, and educator who teaches at the Royal Drawing School in London. Her short comics have previously appeared in print in the Observer and Vogue. Her first children's book, The King Who Banned the Dark, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Klaus Flugge Prize and Independent Bookshop Week Book Awards.

Editorial Reviews

04/05/2021

In this tree-centered narrative, Haworth-Booth warns how greed begets greed, subsequently highlighting the hope that a new generation may bring. “Once upon a time, a group of friends were looking for a place to live,” Haworth-Booth begins, following the group—made up of kids with subtly varied skin tones, all sketched in grayscale—into a forest, where they quickly make themselves at home. With the onset of winter, the group seeks fire and shelter, beginning a destructive journey that eventually leads to widespread deforestation, save for one spindly tree, and a wind-blocking wall constructed to demarcate the “perfect village.” But the wall breeds distrust; wanting to board up their windows and otherwise isolate their houses, each family sends their offspring to harvest the last tree—with unexpected results. Childlike yet detailed colored pencil drawings and comics-style speech bubbles and panels enliven this alluringly environmentalist, community-supportive narrative. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-02-09
A band of wanderers heedlessly turn a sylvan paradise into a drab, soul-destroying settlement.

Hammering on its message with more force than logic, this cheerless variation on The Lorax (1971) and many like parables since squanders a promising beginning and a racially diverse cast that also includes both heterosexual and same-sex couples on simplistic symbolism and a trite outcome. After spending an idyllic summer singing and dancing together under the trees, the new arrivals cut a few branches for firewood. When the resulting gaps in the canopy let in the rain, they cut some more wood for shelters, then yet more for full houses, and finally a towering wall for a windbreak that uses all the remaining trees except for one spindly sapling. By that time they’re all mutually suspicious, spiteful types who send their children out to cut down the last tree so no one else will get it. The children refuse, tearing down part of the wall instead…and when the grown-ups rush out to see where the wind’s coming from, “all at once they understood what they had done.” (Uh-huh.) A day, or at least a page turn, later, tall new trees have suddenly sprouted among the houses, and the erstwhile despoilers are happily turning the wall into, apparently, piles of lumber.

Nothing fresh here, nor even—aside from the colored-pencil backgrounds—green. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews