Where the Forest Meets the Sea

My father says there has been a forest here for over a hundred million years," Jeannie Baker's young protagonist tells us, and we follow him on a visit to this tropical rain forest in North Queensland, Australia.

We walk with him among the ancient trees as he pretends it is a time long ago, when extinct and rare animals lived in the forest and aboriginal children played there. But for how much longer will the forest still be there, he wonders?

Jeannie Baker's lifelike collage illustrations take the reader on an extraordinary visual journey to an exotic, primeval wilderness, which like so many others is now being threatened by civilization.

On a camping trip in an Australian rain forest with his father, a young boy thinks about the history of the plant and animal life around him and wonders about their future.

My father says there has been a forest here for over a hundred million years," Jeannie Baker's young protagonist tells us, and we follow him on a visit to this tropical rain forest in North Queensland, Australia.

We walk with him among the ancient trees as he pretends it is a time long ago, when extinct and rare animals lived in the forest and aboriginal children played there. But for how much longer will the forest still be there, he wonders?

Jeannie Baker's lifelike collage illustrations take the reader on an extraordinary visual journey to an exotic, primeval wilderness, which like so many others is now being threatened by civilization.

Publishers Weekly

A boy travels with his father to a tropical rain forest. Walking among the trees and vines, he imagines the forest as it might have been in the past, with now-extinct creatures and aboriginal children inhabiting it. How much longer, the boy wonders, will the forest remain? Baker's portrayal of unspoiled nature is both an eloquent plea for conservation and a visual tour de force. Her collage constructions have the life and intensity of photographs; at the same time, they embody the inscrutable magic and spirit of a primeval forest. Dinosaurs emerge, barely perceptible, from a tangle of trunks and vines; the faint outlines of an aboriginal child melt into a background of trees; and, in the final, haunting scene, the unspoiled vista readers have toured is overlaid with translucent images of civilization's worst trappings. An exquisitely wrought work with a simple, profound message. All ages. (April)

Jeannie Baker is the author-artist of a number of distinguished picture books. Window, the companion book to Home, was a School Library Journal Best Book, a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, a Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year, a Young Australian Best Book, and was short-listed for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Her other books include Home in the Sky, an ALA Notable Book, and Where the Forest Meets the Sea, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book and the recipient of an IBBY Honor Award and a Friends of the Earth Award in Great Britain. Jeannie Baker makes her home in Sydney, Australia.