Forest as metaphor. I think back to a college literature class, wherein we had to analyze Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and oh, how I hated the forest and its multiple meanings. Shadows were more than shadows and trees were more than trees. Yet, ever since, I have found deep and useful meanings in forests, fictional and real alike.

In Tree Girl, we meet nine year old Anna who lives in a cottage near the sea with Master Mellwyn, the man who took her in as an infant. She loves to sing and dance, loves animals, and longs to understand where she came from. Mellwyn will tell her only that he found her in the forest and that she is not to go there.

When Anna's bonnet sails into the dark forest, she refuses to heed Mellwyn's words. She steps into the forest and thus begins a journey of self discovery. Who is she, where did she really come from, and why can she understand every word a fuzzy brown bear says?

Mellwyn warns her time and again to not go into the forest, for there are goblins afoot. Yet, he leaves her every day to fish, thus giving Anna the opportunity to see her answers.

The bonnet is a handy excuse; once she's had a taste of the forest, she can't not go back. Mellwyn is angered by the idea of her hobnobbing with goblins, doesn't want her talking to bears; he came off as sinister to me, not as an overprotective foster parent. I wanted to believe he loved Anna and that he understood the need for her journey, but never quite got there in these 136 pages.

Anna's questions take her on a marvelous journey through a forest different from the one in Mellwyn's eyes. Where he sees creatures, Anna sees magic. She is entranced by the woods and feels finally at home there. With her friends Eagle and Sash at her side, Anna makes her journey and faces her deepest fears along the way.

The forest will be something different to every person or animal who passes through it. A place of shadows or a place of sunlight filtered through a lattice of branches. A place to hide truth, or discover it. For Mellwyn, it's the former; for Anna, the latter. I wanted to see a better merging of these two viewpoints. I wanted to see the forest bring them together, yet in the end it continues to separate them. Anna is something Mellwyn has been unable to love, the very thing he has feared. Has he come to understand his mistakes or will he remain a bitter old man? We never know.