Beautiful artwork and storyline.

A pretty-looking but heavy-handed parable about the dangers of greed and exploiting natural resources. ( )

Mio and Nao lived in a tree-top village in the valley of Krum, gathering the crown-shell snails deposited by the river that bathed the roots of their arboreal home every night, before receding during the day. Although different as they could be - Mio was a storyteller, and believed in the ancestral tales about the Silver Fox and Fire Wolf who kept the world in balance, while Nao was more practical, and longed for adventure in the everyday world - they were good friends. When the river which provided their sustenance began to dry up, the pair led a group of villagers on a quest to find its source, and the cause of the problem. Could it have anything to do with the beautiful jewel Nao had found? And what did it have to do with the Silver Fox and the Fire Wolf...?

A lovely original fairy-tale and ecological fable is paired with breathtakingly beautiful artwork in The Seekers, the debut picture-book from Indian artists Hari Panicker and Deepti Nair. Created, according to Panicker and Nair's brief afterword, over the course of two years, the illustrations here utilize thirty handmade dioramas and over six hundred layers of cut paper. The intricate cut-paper boxes the author/artists created were then backlit and photographed for the book. I enjoyed the story here, and appreciated its message of ecological balance, but the real stand-out is the artwork! I'm a bag fan of David Wisniewski's gorgeous cut-paper illustration style, and Panicker and Nair have taken that to the next level. Recommended to anyone who appreciates gorgeous picture-book art, and to anyone seeking ecological fables for children. ( )