Wild:
"You cannot tame something
so happily wild."
In this beautiful
picture book by Hawaiian artist Emily Hughes, we meet a little girl who has
known nothing but nature from birth—she was taught to talk by birds, to eat by
bears, and to play by foxes. She is unashamedly, irrefutably, irrepressibly
wild. That is, until she is snared by some very strange animals that look oddly
like her, but they don't talk right, eat right, or play correctly. She's
puzzled by their behavior and their insistence on living in these strange
concrete structures: there's no green here, no animals, no trees, no rivers.
Now she lives in the comfort of civilization. But will civilization get
comfortable with her?
There was once a little
gardener and his garden meant everything to him. He worked hard, very hard, but
he was just too little (or at least he felt he was).
In this gentle,
beautiful tale, Emily Hughes, the celebrated author of Wild, departs from the larger
than life Wild-girl of her debut to pursue a littler than life Gardener, in a
story that teaches us just how important it is to persist and try, no matter
what the odds.
With delicately woven
tapestries of illustrated magic, Hughes once again transports us to a world not
unlike our own, while still brimming with fantasy and wonder.