This home-and-back-again journey story belongs to Evergreen, a wide-eyed squirrel who lives deep in Buckthorn Forest. Evergreen has an extended listing of fears, together with however not restricted to germs, loud noises, heights, swimming and thunderstorms. When her mom asks her to journey by the forest to take soup to Granny Oak, Evergreen responds, “I can’t do it!” However her mom insists (”I do know you might be afraid, however I consider you are able to do it”), so Evergreen places on her scarf and heads out.
In an period of image books that usually comprise sparse textual content, Evergreen stands out for its prolonged, detailed prose. Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell treats readers to an epic story in six enumerated components, stuffed with vigorous dialogue and hand-lettered onomatopoeia. “SKREEEE-EEE!” and “GRRROOOAAARRR!” go the forest creatures who frighten Evergreen on her journey. In a single remarkably spine-tingling second, a red-tailed hawk named Ember swoops down towards Evergreen, picks her up “with razor-sharp talons” and soars into the sky. Cordell provides a dramatic, close-up view of the scene as Evergreen and one other animal run towards the reader, the hawk simply behind them, its majestic wings exceeding the sides of the unfold.
Thankfully, Ember simply wants Evergreen’s assist to take away some painful thorns after an unfortunate encounter with a bramble. “I . . . can do it,” Evergreen whispers, a self-directed pep discuss that turns into her chorus all through the story. With every creature she meets, Evergreen faces one in every of her fears with braveness (and deep breaths and trembling palms), and she or he prevails each time—even when she meets “the Bear,” whose id is a gratifying shock.
Cordell’s world constructing is immensely satisfying, and Evergreen is full of entertaining textual and visible particulars. Evergreen delivers Mama’s “magic soup” in an empty acorn with a screw-on cap; her tattered scarf is pink like one other well-known woodland meals supply courier; and earth tone borders that seem like tree branches body many vignettes. Cordell drops quite a few hints to a sequel, together with a pleasant map beneath the mud jacket and one other supply request from Evergreen’s mom towards the story’s conclusion. Readers could be so fortunate.
