The Dream

Gr 1-5–A girl is called to action after a powerful encounter with nature. The opening illustrations feature belching factories filling the pages with smoke that transforms on the next spread to the clouds of a dream. Traveling home, a young girl looks out the car window to see a blighted landscape due to humankind’s environmental transgressions, from littering to waste-­spewing factories. ­After she returns to her wooded home, she has an encounter with a wolf that leads to a magical experience with animals of all sorts who join to speak out en masse for the protection of their habitats. Their actions inspire the girl to gather other concerned ­humans into a communal force that demands, along with the animals, that we do better for the sake of us all. The details in the illustrations, done in graphite with ­digital painting, capture the devastation of the natural world due to factories, ­deforestation, and industrial farming, juxtaposing it with the power and majesty of nature. The dream blends with reality in such a way that readers will long be discussing where one stops and the other begins. More importantly, children will have witnessed the call to act for the survival of our planet.