Mo Davey, I Am Tree Rex! Berbay Publishing, July 2024, 40 pp., RRP $26.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781922610669
Tree Rex lives happily beside a forest with twenty-one trees. He knows how many there are because he counts them every day. But disaster strikes when one tree is cut down and many more until there are only one or two left. Cutting down the trees has also meant that the birds and animals that call the trees home have nowhere to live. Tree Rex gives them shelter and together they hatch a plan to save the last trees. After the plan works and the celebrations finish, Tree Rex and his friends start to plant seeds so they can gradually regrow the forest.
This is a heart-warming story about the importance of trees to the environment as well as a gentle message about environmental activism. Small children will relate to Tree Rex and will enjoy the play on his name. He is not a scary dinosaur until he needs to act to save the trees (and even then he only scares the ‘tree choppers’, not his animal and bird friends or those reading about him).
The endpapers are cheerful and inviting and depict a range of anthropomorphic birds working together in various ways – their particular roles will be revealed in the rest of the book. Tree Rex displays a range of facial expressions and emotions, and his size varies in relation to other illustrations order to show comparative sizes – very tall trees and small birds, for example.
The design is varied with double page spreads, single page illustrations and ones with multiple illustrations. The written text is quite sparse with the illustrations doing the bulk of the narrative work. This is a book with an important but not overstated message that will be enjoyed by beginning readers and as a read-aloud for younger ones.
Reviewed by Margot Hillel
