“Redwoods” by Jason Chin

This was a book I kept coming across on recommended lists but dismissed several times because it was obviously a picture book. But I kept seeing it listed, over and over, as a “must buy.” So I bought it. Beautiful and breathtaking, it provides voluminous information on redwood trees – more than I knew, and I know a lot. In the story, a young boy riding the NYC subway discovers a book on redwoods. As he reads it, he is transported. The slow growth of the redwood forest around him is clever, and the awe the child finds in this new world seemed to translate off the page to me, as a reader. Having felt swept up in the otherworldly nature of an actual redwood forest, I sensed the same overwhelming wonder in reading the book as I did standing in Muir Woods. My only two complaints are minor and nit-picky. The boy’s face is not drawn consistently from frame to frame, his expressions tend to give him drastically different features at times; and the fauna described are not listed with nametags, so guessing which is which becomes an issue. As I said, small concerns with an otherwise lovely book. A good pick for the whole family.