In a marketplace sinking beneath the weight of words, it behoves the perceptive writer new to the children’s book landscape to reach beyond conventional attributes to find something special in the making of connections. And I don’t mean investment in marketing strategies, although lavish promotion is clearly one key to trajectory.

Yasmine Anane’s new venture, The Family Tree, is calibrated to reinforce anticipation in, especially, young kids. With a lively and loose interchange of anapaests and iambs, whose rollicking rhythms conclude in delicious full rhymes, Anane’s narrative verses will fall with resounding vigour on the receptive ear.

Telling the story of a small group of woodland animals – a mole, a squirrel, an owl and a rabbit – each beset by loneliness until they meet by chance, the writer finds a perfect conceit, in the idea of a search for a family tree, for describing a sense of yearning and displacement. The story’s moral underpinning, expressed in the style of a fable, stresses the need both for tolerance – by the end of the journey through the forest, the animals awaken to the importance of community and togetherness over physical difference – and for mutual understanding, as it should.

Mark Beech’s astonishing illustrations fill every page with colour and vitality, animating the creatures with real character and warmth. A thoughtful and intelligent diversion for young children, The Family Tree is a fine creative collaboration of words and images, and guaranteed to stir the most resistant of youthful imaginations.


The Family Tree will be published by Tiny Tree Books in August, and is available for pre-order.

More information here.