The Star Tree

This illustrator, renowned for her illustrations of her other picture books, all three nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal, has also written the text of this book, marrying the ethereal words with the mythical pictures, creating a book with a wondrous glow about it. It is midnight at midsummer.  Mia is awake, and she tiptoes to her window to look out of the dreaming house to the moonlit garden. Her magical adventure begins as she sits upon her rocking horse, swinging high and low. She wishes on the midsummer moon. As she wishes, the Great White Owl swoops to her window, singing a song, willing her to climb on his back and fly away with him; to sail with the Little Red Hare, (spotted on her windowsill)… away to the north, the snow, looking for the land with a light in a tree. The text murmurs on with such quiet yet demonstrative adjectives creating images beyond those in the illustrations, ‘where the blunted weather vane barely stirs.’ Their destination is reached, ‘as the snow falls and the stars bloom and the sky shines, and Mia plucks one small star from the gleaming tree.’ The homeward journey is just as magical, until we join Mia, deeply sleeping in her bed as the house breathes in, and the house breathes out. This is a book which demands reverential turning of each page, and study of each softly chalked illustration, with an immediate return to the beginning having reached the final page. Hyde has truly captured magic. I loved it.