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Summary
Summary
A lyrical book about the adventure of life, The Forest is also a magnificent visual work, both painterly and a technical feat of paper engineering. Here, sensory experience and the textures of the material world are rendered through die-cuts, embossing, cutouts, and two gatefolds. A beautifully considered work.
Riccardo Bozzi was born in Milan in 1966. He is a journalist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera .
Violeta Lópiz is an illustrator from the Spanish island of Ibiza. Her beautifully textured work is filled with personality and playfulness.
Valerio Vidali is an Italian illustrator based in Berlin. Vidali enjoys botanical gardens and spends his spare time building kites that rarely fly.
Author Notes
Riccardo Bozzi is a journalist and has worked for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera since 1990. He is the author of The World Belongs to You, illustrated by Olimpia Zagnoli (Templar/Candlewick, 2013) and Cher auteur , illustrated by Giancarlo Ascari and Pia Valentinis (Hélium, 2016).
Violeta Lopiz is a Berlin-based Spanish illustrator. She has illustrated numerous books including The Forest (Enchanted Lion Books, 2018), Amigos do Peito (Bruaa, 2014), and Les poings sur les iles (Editions du Rouergue, 2011), which received the CJ Picture Book Award 2011 in the New Books category. She has participated in exhibitions in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel, Turkey, USA, Japan, Korea, and more. El Cultural, the supplement of El Mundo, considers her one of the top ten names of contemporary Spanish illustration. Her work can be found in bookstores, streets, fairs, newspapers, and the thousands of notebooks that she leaves scattered around.
Valerio Vidali is an Italian illustrator of children's books. His book Jemmy Button (Templar/Candlewick, 2013), co-authored with Jennifer Uman, was selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Illustrated Books of 2013.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From its sumptuously colored vellum jacket to its final, mysterious blank white spread, this uncommonly beautiful volume invites readers to marvel over both its daring design and enigmatic messages. Bozzi's minimal text walks readers through "an enormous, ancient forest" where "explorers" travel an increasingly difficult journey. On alternating spreads, subtly embossed images, faintly visible against white pages, show the maturation of a human face from baby to elder, while die-cut eyes reveal startling glimpses of the wild, bright forest in the scenes that follow. Young children may miss some of the metaphorical links to a life's passage, extended in astonishing visual details and dramatic gatefolds. But the sheer marvel of the design, together with the inclusive, open-ended mystery of what lies beyond the forest, makes this a wondrous piece of bookmaking for all ages. Much like a poem, it will evoke new emotions and layers of meaning with repeated readings. Ages 4-up. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A walk through an increasingly dense and perilous forest becomes a pithy metaphor for aging in this poetic picture book for older readers. Stylized images of trees and plants, rendered in thick strokes of bold colors, are in striking contrast to the crisp white backgrounds, some of which are utterly blank or contain barely visible embossed images of faces. Die-cut holes, usually in those faces' eyes, hint at what those faces are gazing at, and the pared-down, lyrical lines give those scenes lots of weight. As they move forward, the forest grows thicker. It becomes both more difficult to penetrate and more fascinating. At first, it seems like the prose is merely describing a walk through a forest, but taken together, the words become deeply poignant. Bozzi meaningfully gestures toward love, hate, nostalgia, language, wisdom, death, and rebirth, usually indirectly. It's a beautiful object, with a stunning, highly tactile layout, and while it's not quite clear who the ideal audience would be adults and artistically inclined teenagers might like it, too those who connect with its enigmatic beauty will be transfixed.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE DEATH OF TRUTH: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, by Michiko Kakutani. (Tim Duggan Books, $22.) The former Times book critic draws on her extensive reading to portray an America that is creeping toward authoritarianism by way of the current administration's distortions and manipulations. EARLY WORK, by Andrew Martin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer's romantic entanglements, is like one of those restaurant dishes that present multiple preparations of a vegetable on the same plate - "beets, three ways" - to capture its essence. "Early Work" is books, three ways. MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas, by Mark Kurlansky. (Bloomsbury, $29.) Kurlansky, chronicler of food and its history, from "Salt" to "Cod," now turns to milk and how it has wended its way through many civilizations and cultures, exploring everything from breast-feeding to the qualities of camel milk. CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX, by Jordy Rosenberg. (One World, $27.) A mind-bending romp through a gender-fluid, 18th-century London, Rosenberg's debut novel is a joyous mash-up of literary genres shot through with queer theory and awash in sex, crime and revolution. POGROM: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, by Steven J. Zipperstein. (Liveright, $27.95.) Before the Holocaust, POGROM Jewish suffering was synonymous with the name of the city, Kishinev, where in 1903,49 Jews were killed in a paroxysm of violence. Zipperstein examines not just the event but also its far-reaching repercussions. FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. (Doubleday, $26.95.) This beautifully rendered novel, rich in specific detail inspired by the author's experience, explores the responsibility of those with choices to those without, against the backdrop of a terrifying subject - coming of age amid the uncontrolled violence of the Colombian civil war. YOUR BLACK FRIEND AND OTHER STRANGERS, by Ben Passmore. (Silver Sprocket, $20.) Passmore, a young artist who cut his teeth in the anarchist punk scene of New Orleans, draws on the daily stress of his encounters with white people in this graphic novel collecting his recent strips. LOULOU AND YVES: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent, by Christopher Petkanas. (St. Martin's, $45.) This flashy, gossip-packed oral history details how de La Falaise changed fashion as muse to Yves Saint Laurent. THE FOREST, by Ricardo Bozzi. Translated by Debbie Bibo. Illustrated by Violeta Lopiz and Valerio Vidali. (Enchanted Lion, $25.95; ages 4 and up.) This oversize picture book, with beautiful die-cut pages, follows explorers through a forest at once literal and existential. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books .
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up-Employing the forest as a metaphor for life, a narrator takes readers through a verdant, sometimes knotty landscape, acknowledging both its mystery and pleasures. The games the travelers create, the stories they share, and the notes they leave behind as they wander through the landscapes' "beauties and dangers," which grow more fascinating and more difficult to navigate, are all observed, as are the characters and personalities of those who pass through. It's a spare, quietly paced, but forward moving text. For most travelers, this is not a solitary expedition; along the way they experience friendship, rivalries, and love. Ultimately, though, there is no turning back on this journey, which ends after an arduous climb, with a fall into a ravine. "No one knows" what lies beyond, notes the narrator, who circles back to a line delivered early in the book, "some say there is a grove of young pines." Two illustrators contributed to the exquisite visual and tactile bookmaking. Spreads of lush forest scenes peopled with embossed full-length white figures, many guiding the way or carrying packs (read: burdens) are interspersed with white spreads featuring barely visible embossed faces that slowly age and scar, and die-cut holes that peek into the next scene. Gatefolds and an illustrated, translucent onion-skin cover wrap add another layer to the stunning book art. VERDICT While American readers may find this mediation on life-and death-somewhat direct, even startling, its abundant symbols and beautiful book design are sure to intrigue sophisticated readers.-Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Bozzi, an Italian journalist and poet, envisions a forest journey as a metaphor for the stages of life. The book's design is clever, instantly arousing curiosity with its translucent jacket (sans title) overlaying brilliantly hued vegetation onto a muted cover. The first double-page spread is all white, containing a straightforward sentence on the verso and a debossed face with die-cut eyes through which color is visible on the recto. A pattern is established. The white pages depict, by embossing or debossing only, a sequence of humans of varying races who gradually age. These file between spreads of greenery that similarly transform from a small grove to a progressively more crowded forest, then barren woodland. As youths, the explorers study insects and invent games. Later they notice fellow travelers, whose diversity is mentioned in terms of height, shade, and temperament, with potential for rivalry or love. Some leave traces (art carved in stone), but ultimately, "there is a ravine into which each explorer will eventually fall, despite the precautions taken and the advancements of science." The final etched face gradually fades as saplings rise through its cracks. Death is unequivocally a mystery. Some will appreciate the final blank pages for contemplation. For others of any age, confronting one's own mortality in a context in which life seems neither meaningful nor to be remembered will be disquieting.Students of design will appreciate the construction and the lush, vibrant compositions; those seeking comfort for end-of-life matters will want to look elsewhere. (Picture book. 10-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
