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I had heard of the book The Night Life of Trees, by Chennai-based Tara Publishing, and the fact that it had won the Bologna Ragazzi “New Horizons” Award (the first title from India to do so) before going to the Bologna Book Fair. The award spotlights the cultural heritage and innovative drive coming from children’s book publishing in the Arab world, Latin America, Asia and Africa, so I knew the book was bound to be a treat. But nothing could have prepared me for the jolt I experienced when I finally saw it.

When you flip through the book’s pages you understand why it has won a prestigious children’s book award even though it was originally created as an art book. The book rekindles one’s sense of wonder. Everything about it invites closer inspection: the wonderful ink smell; the texture of the handmade paper; the intricacy of the majestic trees inhabited by creatures; the myths and folktales accompanying them…

Tara Publishing’s website states that their books are “largely visual in nature – and radical, witty and informed in spirit.” The Night Life of Trees is, no doubt, one such book. Silk-screened and hand-bound, with its luminous trees jumping out of the pages’ black backdrop, this book offers a glimpse into the world views of three of the finest artists from the Gond tribe of Madhya Pradesh, in Central India, namely, Ram Singh Urveti, Durga Bai and Bhajju Shyam.

The idea for the book, we learned from a presentation given by Tara founder Gita Wolf and editor Sirish Rao on the first day of the book fair, came out of one of Tara’s illustrators’ workshops. Participants from the Gond tribe kept including trees on every single one of their drawings. “When asked to draw a bird, they would draw a bird on a tree; when asked to draw a person, they would draw a person next to a tree; when asked to draw clouds, they would draw clouds over a tree, and so on,” (more…)

Dana's Sister,Brandy,had her tenth birthday and she always gets her way so this year she had a egg hunt and at first everyone was just looking for eggs but when they heard they weren't hard boiled that's when a egg fight started.It was very messy and Brandy got in trouble and then Dana found this huge egg that had veins and a heart beat.He took it in his room and put it in his sock drawer.The next morning he heard a loud cracking noise and when he opened his drawer he found this huge gross blob of eggs with two black beady eyes.

What I like about the book is it is like the book "How I Got My Shrunken Head" because in this book the boy figures out how to use the shrunken head and figures out how it has cool powers,and the egg monsters have powers if you touch one.How I got my shrunken head is cool,too.