I was given this book at almost the same time as I finished Demon Copperhead.

Demon Copperhead, as long as a battle, wound me in beside its main character to witness the traumas of his growing up, while The Last Tree – A Seed of Hope, by Luke Adam Hawker, is very different.

This book spun me like a leaf through its roots, allowing me to drift along with its young protagonist Olive when she loses touch with her classmates on a visit to the Tree Museum. There she becomes absorbed by a picture of The Last Tree. She sits in front of it, imagining how it would have been to climb trees and to live amongst them. At the end of the visit, when the class leaves for home, she is eager to see her father, and is clutching a seed that they will plant together for the generations to come.

That’s the story, but it’s the illustrations – pages of lovely drawings in black and white – that really pull the narrative wide, exploring and imagining through the eyes of a small child in a big world, and using only a few lines of text to do so.

I loved this book. It’s gentle but intense, and hard to resist flicking through again and again.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023