Review by Booklist Review
The forest animals have been enjoying an uneventful summer when "a mysterious poster" appears advertising a party. Following the merriment, the animals return home to a horrifying sight: "Our homes had disappeared. Only their skeletons remained." Wandering among tree stumps, the birds, bears, and bunnies fret before building makeshift shelters of trash dumped nearby. After eventually finding their beloved trees "cut into pieces!" by "strange creatures" (humans), the animals reclaim their stolen homes and guide the people through replanting the woods. In this heavily allegorical modern fable shining light on the climate refugee crisis and deforestation, the spare, first-person-plural text brings immediacy to the story, allowing readers to clearly see the negative and positive impacts humans can have on environmental health. Full-page gouache and colored-pencil illustrations on buttery backgrounds are animal-forward, with looser human portraiture and bold, hand-lettered text often overlaying somewhat tumultuous art. Its impact isn't subtle, and the book should find a happy home where conversations around environmental advocacy already abound.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Horn Book Review
Bears, rabbits, foxes, and other small animals are living happily in a piney forest when a sign advertising a party lures them away to a revelry where they dance the cha-cha and eat "a lot of chocolate cake. Way too much!" They return home to find a horror: the trees, their homes, are gone. Desperate for shelter, they find "a mountain of all sorts of objects" -- a dump. They try to use the things they find there to build new homes, which prove unstable. Naive-style illustrations in gouache and colored pencil enhance the first-person-plural narration from the animals' collective point of view. Eventually, the animals realize that "strange creatures," humans, have taken their trees. Bears wearing human masks approach people in their homes to discuss the problem, with predictably disastrous results. The animals shift strategy and, in consultation with the "strange creatures' small guardians" (dogs and cats), hatch their own plan to turn the tables and give the humans a comeuppance. The humorous tone invites readers to consider their own actions, creating an effective, entertaining, and approachable lesson in habitat preservation. This book (previously published in French and then translated from the Portuguese edition) will find a happy home in schools and libraries for lessons, storytimes, and one-on-one sharing. Adrienne L. PettinelliNovember/December 2025 p.55 (c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Natural habitats and the constructed world clash in an imaginative conflict. A cluster of critters, content in their sylvan surroundings, notice a poster alerting them to a party and happily decide to attend. Bears, bunnies, foxes, and birds in party hats dance and eat cake, but when the celebration's over, it's really over. Upon returning to the forest, the animals find that their trees have been razed for timber! In their place are mountains of human-made detritus. The animals try to repurpose this tangle of old chairs, televisions, and other castoffs, ominously etched in red lines, into shelters, with little luck. They resort to retaliation, enlisting assistance from the humans' small guardians (their pets) to get their people to attend a party. The wild animals reclaim their homes while the humans are making merry, finally sparking understanding and working out their issues with a tree-planting truce. Visually, this Portuguese import is lovely--playfully paced and gleefully odd. Animals ascend a surreal trash heap, humanoid rabbits gnaw fruitlessly on shoes, and a bear dons a terrifically terrifying human mask. The intentionally off-kilter look of the watercolors and shaky pencil lines recalls Maira Kalman's whimsically absurd style without mimicking her. The narrative struggles by comparison, resolving the challenges of conservation with a clean-cut conclusion that simplifies a very real problem, falling short of the book's visual expansiveness. A stylish, strange story with a somewhat overly simple conclusion.(Picture book. 4-8) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
