"The Last Tree" by Emily Haworth-Booth (Pavilion Children's Books)

You won't have long to wait for this one, in fact it's out tomorrow so you've got no excuse - nip down to your favourite bookstore of choice in the morning for a copy of "The Last Tree" by Emily Haworth-Booth.

We've seen a huge explosion of books on the blog that deal with the climate crisis in several amazing and fairly direct ways, but sometimes you need a bit more 'oomph' in your story to make it accessible to younger readers, but also avoid the 'oh no not again' eyeroll from older book fans.

Emily manages this with aplomb in a tale that begins with a tribe of people all looking for a place to shelter.

The mountains are too windy, the valleys are too wet, the baking hot plains are no good either - and soon the folk find an amazing forest filled with trees.

The air is cooler there but not too cold, and those amazing leafy trees offer brilliant shelter.

That is - alas - until things start to go horribly wrong...


To greedily protect their new find, they come up with a plan to hack down all the trees, and cart them off to build a colossal wall, hopefully to avoid anyone else being able to move into their newfound home. A huge mistake, when only one tiny little withered tree is left. The last tree in fact.


But - as in the real actual here and now world - it's the kids that have the brains in this story. They realise that the answer does not lie in deforestation, the answer is to nurture that one last tree, encouraging it to grow stronger, and stronger, and stronger.

Emily has expertly conjured up a story that may seem quite simplistic at first, but does a brilliant job of holding up a mirror to our own world, where 'grown ups' seem hell bent in driving the planet towards the very brink, yet a strong steely-eyed army of youngsters are doing their level best to show us the error of our ways, and hopefully drag us back from the brink of irreparable climate change.

Sum this book up in a sentence: As we mentioned at the top of the review, this is a brilliant book to introduce kids to the concepts of ecology and saving the environment while giving older kids plenty to nod along to, and the whole package is extremely engaging, classy and dare we say even fun to read aloud?

"The Last Tree" by Emily Haworth-Booth is out tomorrow, 6th February 2020, published by Pavilion Children's Books (kindly supplied for review)