Finders of Silverthorn Forest: The Lost Treasures

This magical adventure story for children takes place in an enchanted forest – one that is under threat from greedy capitalists, eager to develop their new car park.

The young fox Tuftorious Snook (or ‘Tuft’, for short) strikes a curious image, adorned with one slipper and one Wellington boot and baggy dungarees, as he treks through the woodland looking for ‘treasure’. Anything from discarded tin foil to an old umbrella count as treasure but, despite coveting human objects, Tuft, like all ‘Finders’, knows that human beings are frightening beasts to be avoided at all costs. It’s a terrifying moment, then, when Tuft finds Max hiding in his treasure trove (an old treehouse).

Max is a young boy whose elderly grandma owns the forest and has tasked Max with finding a sentimental time capsule she buried when she was a young girl. Max must work at speed because, tomorrow, the house and surrounding lands are being sold to a new developer. He thinks he has found a clue in Grandma’s old treehouse when he is discovered by Tuft. Very quickly, the pair recover from the shock that humans aren’t evil/foxes can talk, and realise they may have a shared goal: one that is threatened by bulldozers and by Tuft’s fellow Finders and their unbreakable rules regarding finding and keeping. The race is on to find Grandma’s time capsule and rescue the animals from the destruction of their home.

The story is essentially a two-hander, with Max and Tuft exploring one another’s worlds and learning to reconsider everything they thought they knew. Together, they grow brave enough to face their fears and stand up to the Finders’ outdated rules and the greedy developers’ earth-movers.

Catalán’s illustrations are of the highest quality, delivering a pleasing balance of cute and cuddly with action and drama. They are used generously and creatively to draw readers deeper into the story, sometimes as full-page spreads and other times as border decorations.

For a book marketed as ‘magical’ and ‘enchanted’, there is little in the way of fantasy content, beyond the hoard of talking, endearingly-dressed foxes. The dominant themes are family and kindness, with both Tuft and Max showing remarkable levels of empathy even when faced with a world completely different to their own. The relationships that they both have with their grandparents are also heartwarming, and will evoke fond memories in many readers. Readers eager to lose themselves in a magical, new world may be disappointed by the limited scope of this series-opener, but Tuft and Max are engaging protagonists so plenty of young readers will be happy to stick with them into future episodes.