100 Books Like Emma Oliver and the Song of Creation

This book is the story of a boy who runs away from his chaotic but loving home in New York City to try his hand at living in the wilderness of upstate New York.

I found it totally charming and instructive. He hollows out a tree to make himself a comfortable place to observe and embrace the Winter on the side of a mountain. This book is written more for child philosophers than Earth-Loving elders, but I read it to my husband, and we both enjoyed it greatly.

It is a different take on mother nature love than the others I have recommended, yet it still shines.

A fable about forest creatures coming together and putting differences aside to save their home from the Smashbasher. This book is an early chapter book for 7-9-year-olds and includes beautiful illustrations. The trees have names and are inhabited by various creatures. Heartwood will bring children closer to the magic of the forest and nature. 

I recommend this book because I live in the redwood forest and love trees myself. The book captures the essence of the magic we feel when we enter an unspoiled forest, and how important it is to protect these sacred and life-giving places. The fact that the only way for the forest creatures to save their home is to find their similarities and work together strikes me as particularly relevant today.

Ursula K Le Guin does not pull any punches in The Word for World is Forest, placing the peaceful nature-oriented inhabitants of the planet Athshe firmly in the grips of the callous colonists from Terra. The Athsheans find no alternative but to fight back and reclaim their world and their forests.

I was inspired by this book, which Le Guin wrote before the environmental dangers we acknowledge today became so blatantly evident. As an author, she was prophetic and brave, the kind of author I can only aspire to be.

The Athshean characters that she creates are also courageous, reclaiming their world by forcing the Terrans to retreat from the planet. I would so dearly love to feel as connected to our planet as the Athsheans do to theirs. 

I love the way A Long Walk to Water follows two characters in two different timelines to reinforce the importance of water to survival. It’s an exciting combination of a true story and fictionalized one that intersect in an unexpected but wonderful way. Readers of any age, but especially younger ones, will be shocked by what one 11-year-old girl must do to obtain just a minimal daily amount of water for her family’s survival. They will also be inspired by how one 11-year-old boy, after barely surviving wartime experiences in his African homeland, returns years later to make a lasting impact on the lives of others. The double-pronged impact of these characters and their suspenseful stories will instantly engage readers, keep them enthralled to the final page, and leave a long-lasting impression.

This is more than a story, although it is a wonderful one. It is an eye-opener to the… show more.

How can something as small as an acorn grow to the height of a skyscraper? Treemendous: Diary of a Not Yet Mighty Oak illustrates the life of a tiny acorn growing up to be a tall oak tree. It uses delightful and humorous text and adorable illustrations to communicate the basic science behind this phenomenal happening in nature. What a wonderful way to learn about our nation’s tree.

I read Kiernan’s book only recently and found it entrancing. It’s a novel that defies any easy description. In a way, it’s about a grieving writer who takes up residence in an isolated house to try to recover from the death of her partner and to try to start writing again. Nothing more happens except her occasional drives to the local village and walks to the nearby red tree. But the book bursts with richness–with complex storytelling and, we slowly realize, with an increasingly unreliable narrator. As the narrator finds, reads, and transcribes a manuscript of local folklore she found in the house, the novel increasingly blurs the boundaries between past and present, reality and delusion. At times, I found myself unsure of where I was or whose words I was reading. All the stories converge, though, on the red tree, which exerts some force over those that come within… show more.

The title is a refrain that rings around the world, as the children in two families, in two settings, plant a tree.

As in my book, time is a driving element here, bringing to light the cumulative effects of planting trees. Those effects, from clean air and soil retention to the bounty of fruit and the blessings of shade, are beautifully realized in the final page that brings it all back to the young characters and by inference, to the reader.

I found this guidebook the best for identifying species and explaining their characteristics within a forest. Knowing the species improved my forest photgraphy greatly.

This story, with wonderful illustrations, is a different way to believe in yourself. A girl wants a pet for her birthday—a tree! Her parents reluctantly give in. She finds a little tree, names it Fido, puts it in a pot and takes it everywhere in her wagon. A neighbor kid says his cat is a real pet. When the tree is too big for her wagon, her dad helps her plant it in her yard. Now she has a tree she can climb, sit in and read books, surrounded by birds! She says, “A tree is everyone’s friend.” 

Like me, when he was a kid, Paul was told he couldn’t write. He got an F, with the note: “Get a tutor.”

It seems as though Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees kicked off a slew of new books on seeing nature from a fresh perspective. Learning that trees communicate, as do other plants, warning and protecting each other is a sort of modern, scientific parlance for what in Shakespeare’s day might have been the fairyland antics in the anima of plants. But Thirteen Ways takes it a step further, opening an unexpected sensorial ‘conversation’ with our arboreal kin. Naso may be “smelling out the odouriferous flowers” in Love’s Labours Lost but Haskell has us inhaling deeply these silent sentinels that populate our lives with scant acknowledgment, with “every aroma is an invitation to stories of interconnection between trees and people.” And he proceeds to tell us some stories that make you ache for the intimacy of knowing a tree so well. I can’t wait to be able to identify a… show more.