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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
Whoa. Beautifully engineered and a beautiful story.
The Forest a collaborate book by Riccardo Bozzi, Violeta Lopiz, and Valerio Vidali, is not so much an actual "children's illustrated story" as it is a metaphorically poetic work of art in book form, better suited to adults. As a beautifully crafted object, the book itself is filled with lovely illustrations combined with plain white embossed pages, perforated with holes large enough to give the appreciator a glimpse forward to contents on a page in a future experience. About a third of the way through the text, it becomes clear that this eponymous forest is a mephor for life, and that the cyclical quality of life is artistically expressed in the crafting of the book. As with life, sometime before the end, you actually say about your experience, "Oh, wow!"
I feel like I don't 100% understand what I'm supposed to take from this, but what I did take from it is journeying forward, time passing, life, death, and all of the loveliness in between. This is very, very different, and I enjoyed it.
The visuals alone are 5 stars, but the story hit home (Read the English version, but that’s not on Goodreads?)
A beautiful masterpiece, that has different levels and would be a good discussion book.
The illustrations' mix of watercolor and embossing & cut-outs on heavy white paper effectively matches the text's mix of descriptions of a trip into a forest and a metaphor of birth, development, aging, and death - in that neither is fully effective even though they are both lyrical and beautiful.
The illustrations are hard to make out, even after you catch on to what you should be looking for, just as the text is hard to decipher even after you catch on that it's a double metaphor.
But the pictures are lovely.
The illustrations are hard to make out, even after you catch on to what you should be looking for, just as the text is hard to decipher even after you catch on that it's a double metaphor.
But the pictures are lovely.
If you can get your hands on this unusual book, it's one to see in person, from its translucent vellum jacket to its inner pages, which have die-cut eyes, embossed faces (the whole book is a very tactile experience), gatefold pages, and tangled watercolor trees. Also, it's a meditation on the stages of life. Ripe for discussion with the right adults & older kids.
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced