by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 25, 2010

A little boy walks into a scary black-and-white forest that's so big its stretches across both the book's front and back cover. ("Into the forest," reads a sign on one tree - which is also the name of the book.) It's a moody illustration, but it's also a great symbol of the book's theme: facing depression. The boy's father isn't home, and no one knows when he'll be returning. And it's in the forest that the boy will ultimately have to confront his feelings.

"I missed Dad," the boy says, but in the story by Anthony Browne, there's lots of other children with problems. The boy's mother asks him to carry a basket of cake to his grandmother, and warns him not to travel through the forest. But the boy does walk through that scary black and white forest, with its twisty tree trunks and scraggly, leafless branch, and he's confronted by one child who wants to eat grandmother's cake, and then another. Then he meets two more children huddling by a tree trunk, who say they're missing both their father and mother.

It's a beautiful way to explore the idea of depression, honoring the feeling instead of trying to fix it, and offering as consolation a different message: that you're not alone. But I like how the story remains unpredictable, and dark and mysterious.  "As I walked on, I could hear the dreadful sound of the girl crying, but what could I do?" the boy thinks. And then he gets lost in the woods himself...

Anthony Browne plays with the fact that this story seems vaguely familiar. The little boy wears a red coat that he found hanging from a tree, and when he gets to grandma's house, her voice doesn't sound like grandma.  But with all the menacing, ominous drawings, the book finds it way to the perfect happy ending. The boy finds his way to grandma's house, he's reunited with his father, and everyone gets to enjoy the delicious cake.

In a book this dark, the happy ending is a real surprise. And this whole book gave me a new respect for Anthony Browne as an illustrator. According to the book's jacket, in 2000 he won the highest international award for children's book illustration - the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. ("Rich in surreal detail, his distinctive artwork has made him a favorite with children and adults the world over...") The best illustrations capture a feeling that's universal to both children and adults, and that's unmistakably true for Anthony Browne's pictures for "Into the Forest". They take the story beyond the realm of a simple children's picture book and turn it into an intense and memorable experience.

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