Two tenacious sycamore seeds bear witness to the passing of millennia in an epic struggle for survival in Brian Selznick's cinematic and hopeful Big Tree. The seeds are catapulted into an adventure of many lifetimes, a tale planted in nature but endearingly tinged with the fantastical, a saga that unfolds over more than 500 pages of Selznick's contemplative text and characteristically intricate black-and-white pencil images.

Tiny Louise cannot see past her siblings with whom she is crammed inside a sycamore seed ball. Despite her limited view, Louise's imagination runs wild and she dreams "the stars [are] calling" to her. "I think they're trying to tell me something, but they're very hard to understand," she laments to her seed-sibling Merwin. One peaceful dawn is interrupted by an urgent message for their mama from the Ambassadors, mushroom emissaries from "a vast underground system... connecting all the roots of the trees in the forest like an endless river of knowledge." A Giant is coming, they report, and a confusing signal warns the mushrooms of "Danger!" Those warnings prove real and imminent: there is a fire, and one Giant--revealed over a dozen tense pages to be a long-tailed dinosaur--begins a stampede. Mama launches her children and, before they explode into the sky, she reminds them she provided them with "roots and wings" for life on their own.

The seed siblings cling to one another's fluff during their tumultuous flight, which ends in a brief island respite (of sorts) before they tumble into an underwater fiefdom. King Seaweed, whose narcissistic dialogue reads like a comical Disney villain, traps them in a shell where they meet another network of messengers, the Scientists. Like Louise, the Scientists hear faint messages, theirs from a voice they call the Old One "that speaks of a warning" they cannot yet understand. "Louise, there is no Old One," dismisses Merwin. But a Scientist floats over to Merwin. "Maybe you are not paying attention." "Paying attention to what?" the little seed asks. "The world," the Scientists answer in unison.

At every turn, that world places the seeds in peril as they struggle to find a place to take root. Even when they finally return to land, Louise has a sense of foreboding and Merwin is myopically focused on reaching a nearby mountain. "Something bigger than we can imagine" is coming, says Louise knowingly. "The voice wants me to help...."

Louise and Merwin's adventures continue. They flee threatening cattails and free a tiny, winged insect from its cocoon, an ally they name Spot who returns later in the story to repay the favor. A decomposing leaf offers the seeds a meditative lesson on the cycle of life, and they are briefly eaten by a dinosaur with "huge yellow teeth and a vast pink tongue." When they finally reach the mountain, it proves their most dangerous encounter yet. The pair become separated and millennia pass. Time and memory blur. During this solitude, Merwin finally listens to the voice Louise had long ago perceived. Through a stretch of spare prose, expansive drawings and blank pages, the omnipotent Old One shares with Merwin a history of the cosmos and offers Merwin an understanding of what Louise had recognized long before about the power of community in the natural world. The siblings are ultimately reunited in a joyful turn of events before the story hurtles forward 66 million years to close with another sprout joining a community of nature, thanks to the helping hands of a gentle child.

Fans of Selznick's celebrated prior works such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck will be familiar with his signature approach to storytelling using an elaborate blend of prose and detailed drawings. As with many of Selznick's books with human protagonists, Big Tree is fundamentally the story of a child separated from a parent and forced to find their way alone. (Louise and Merwin's wandering just takes a few millennia longer than most.) More than half of this adventure unfolds through images, with large-scale cosmic collisions as carefully rendered as close-ups of finely etched tree bark, delicate lacewings and the comically arched brow of a befuddled carnivore. Constant shifts in perspective and proximity match pace with the seeds' turbulent journey. Selznick, through an exquisite use of negative space, conveys the loneliness of Merwin's extended dormancy (captured, aptly, in a chapter entitled "Time"), and the author perfects the art of the page turn throughout, offering readers commanding results.

This story originated with filmmaker Steven Spielberg and animation mastermind Chris Meledandri before the pandemic ground their screen project to a halt. Selznick's cinematic rendering lends intimacy to a printed tale that is at once enormous in scope yet profoundly direct in its messaging. The story is richly detailed and firmly rooted in scientifically accurate information (as explained in helpful backmatter), though Selznick takes some necessary liberties with the anthropomorphization of the seeds.

Big Tree demonstrates impressive versatility, with its genre-expansive themes and accessibility to early and visual readers with simultaneous appeal to an older audience. While potentially introducing many to harmonious phenomena like fungal systems and the Wood Wide Web, the story underscores an immediate need for us to stop, listen to nature and work together to avoid the environmental disasters awaiting us on our current path. "It's a hard world for little things," concedes the Old One, but "there's always something you can do." --Kit Ballenger

(photo: Slimane Lalami)

Brian Selznick is the Caldecott Medal-winning author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wonderstruck and The Marvels, the first two of which were adapted into movies and all of which were bestsellers. Selznick's Big Tree, which began as an idea from filmmaker Steven Spielberg, will be published by Scholastic on April 4, 2023. Here, Selznick talks with Shelf Awareness about scientific research, storytelling through art and the joy of creative collaborations.

The author's note in the book tells readers how this story began as a concept with film director Steven Spielberg and Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri. You've worked with a writing partner before; was story plotting different working with visual creators?

I think in pictures, so the process of imagining the story with Spielberg and Meledandri felt familiar in many ways. But the experience of sitting around a table with them bouncing ideas back and forth was really thrilling. As a bookmaker, I have a limited but endlessly adaptable technology at my disposal: the page turn. I remember one particularly fun moment while we were developing the movie, when Spielberg thought there might be a place in the screenplay to create a scene inspired by Busby Berkely dance sequences from old movie musicals. I immediately imagined a sequence where we learn about the history of the universe, and by the time we get to the Cretaceous era, which is when I set the story, all life on Earth would be working together in perfect harmony. It wasn't going to be "dance" exactly, but it would hopefully convey the idea of how all of nature works together. When it was time to transform the screenplay into a book, this became a drawn sequence where I tried to capture the movement and the harmony I'd pictured for the film, but now presented as an almost abstract series of images that start with the Big Bang and move us through evolution to the Cretaceous era.

Big Tree is more than 500 pages long and about 60% is illustration. How did you strike the balance between text and art?

The first thing I do is come up with the story itself, the narrative. As I'm writing down these ideas, I do often have a sense of what I'd like to draw, but I never draw anything until much later in the process. For the movie, I wasn't going to be doing any drawing. All the visuals would have been created by a team of professional animators. In my books, the visual sequences can serve many purposes: they can move the action forward; they can focus on an important aspect of the story; they can convey emotions and reveal surprises. I never use speech bubbles or descriptions on my drawings, so all the dialogue must appear on the text pages along with anything you can't see, such as thoughts and descriptions of sounds and smells. Also, I find there are some visual moments that are more exciting to imagine than to see, so I keep those as text. Therefore, the location and pacing of the pictures and picture sequences are relatively random. If I notice that there's a particularly long stretch without any drawings, I might see if I can add a drawing or two, but usually I let instinct and chance do the work.

Your use of white space surrounding some of the text blocks is striking. It's almost as if the text is breathing. What do you hope this signals for the reader?

I realized page turns could be utilized to help underscore some of the dramatic moments in the text, the same way I'd been using them to help with the drama of the drawings. One of my favorite adult novels, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, uses white space and page turns to highlight important text toward the end of the book. I believed there were places in Big Tree where giving the pages the ability to breathe, as you say, could help with some of the more otherworldly moments, especially in the moments when Louise talks to the stars at the beginning of the book and when the Earth talks to Merwin toward the end.

A seed isn't your standard protagonist. What helped you sit in Louise's and Merwin's perspectives? What was it like to personify seeds?

I was very surprised when Spielberg and Meledandri wanted me to write a story about nature from nature's point of view. The reason I chose seeds was because I realized they have many parallels to the sorts of characters I usually create. Seeds, like my characters, are often separated from their parent, are blown about by chance, and must search for a safe place to grow. I'd already made a rule for myself that everything in the narrative must be based on science. For instance, plants really can communicate with each other, so talking was allowed, but they would not be allowed to get up and walk around on their roots, since they can't do that in real life. The fluff at the end of sycamore seeds helps them move through the air, so personifying the fluff and making it move like little arms and legs fit into my rule. There were some tricky moments though. When I was writing the text, there were certain words or descriptions I discovered I couldn't use. For instance, I couldn't say the seeds cried because they have no eyes, but I could describe what was happening inside them. They could feel sadness; and they could get excited, even perhaps feel a tingle of anticipation. Hopefully the reader never notices this. It's all meant to help you believe that the thoughts, feelings and conversations are coming from two tiny seeds.

As you said (and explain in the back matter), everything in your narrative is based in science. Why was that important to you?

The point of this story, in many ways, is to bring attention to the natural world around us and [for readers] to understand that no matter how small we are and how helpless we may feel, there's always something we can do. I hope the reader finishes the book and then goes out into the world and sees real sycamore trees, ferns, cattails and other plants, and feels as though they understand these complex creatures in a new way. Connecting and falling in love with the characters in the story might help readers understand why it's important and worthwhile to care about nature. A tree isn't just a tree--it's a living being that's part of a complex ecosystem, and that's true for all living things, including us.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know? Are you working on anything currently that you'd like to discuss?

I'm currently working on lots of projects, including a musical of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a movie of The Marvels and a stage adaptation of Wonderstruck! I've also begun my next illustrated novel, but anything else about that must remain a secret for now! --Kit Ballenger