Synopsis
The huge, 400-year-old oak tree sees many people come and go during the course of its life as a Mai-Mehtug or "path-tree" to the inland forest.
The life of a tree is observed from it's time as a young sapling through it's full grown majesty--a monument to the beauty of nature. Watercolor paintings illustrate the text.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-04-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 11.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
Beginning life as a sapling in a large forest, an oak tree is molded by centuries of people and customs that surround it, and enduring the harshness of land development, the tree becomes a monument to the majesty of nature.
Industry Reviews
The long-lived tree as witness to history could almost be a subgenre in picture books, but Carrier (There Was a Hill...) gives this motif a twist literally. As her story begins, Native Americans choose a sapling in a dense forest and train it to a bent position, so that it becomes a path-tree, or guidepost, along the forest trail. During the colonial period, the tree's distinctive horizontal trunk supports a child's rope-swing; later, it becomes a lookout perch for shipbuilders' children. Over the next 200 years, the tree survives the land's succession from forest to farmland, back to forest and then to contemporary residential development. Complementing misty, softly textured watercolors, Carrier's prose is quiet and finely crafted. For example, she likens the second-growth forest to "a bear's thick winter coat, all new and shiny." She stops just short of personifying the tree as she dramatizes its experiences. An endnote provides further information on path-trees, a few of which survive in the Great Lakes region. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)
Lopate
Gr 2-4 Carrier's fictional account of one tree's life covers a broad sweep of history. Native Americans bend an oak sapling to shape it as a trail marker pointing west. Colonists arrive and clear the forest, but the bent oak is spared to serve first as a swinging tree and then as a lookout. Contemporary suburban sprawl almost claims it until an alert man recognizes its unique history as a pointer to the inland forests. The author's focus on these little-known trail markers adds a novel dimension to picture books such as Linda Vieira's The Ever-Living Tree (Walker, 1994) or Bruce Hiscock's The Big Tree (Atheneum, 1991). The pastel, impressionistic quality of the watercolor illustrations lends a romantic overtone to a story of repeated ecological destruction. Even the new housing project is bathed in a soft glow. Yet the pictures are adequate to help introduce a topic that could provide a new twist to units on early North America or about changing landscapes. Kathy Piehl, Mankato State University, MN
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