The Blue Forest

The Blue Forest

The Blue Forest is a collection of seven highly imaginative bedtime stories one story for each night of the week, and each story featuring one of seven colors. The stories, set in a magical blue forest, tell of mysterious nighttime events and relationships involving humans and animals and nature.<br><br>In the first story, a small girl, wearing a dress as white as the stars and embroidered with fine golden thread, walks a path through the forest of blue trees. While making her way through the silent woods, she discovers a casket of jewels from which she selects a silver ring. As she places it on her finger it twinkles in unison with a star, which just at that moment peers through the foliage of a nearby tree. In the last story an old woman tends a garden where the flowers unfold at nightfall to greet the stars. While the old woman sings and plants blue seedlings, a pink butterfly alights on her head. When she turns back to the garden path to her house, the pink butterfly flutters off into the dark woods, arriving at a simple hut where a girl in a white dress with golden embroidery sleeps. The seventh story thus joins the tales into a circle.<br><br>Other characters in The Blue Forest include: a red bird whose mellifluous song inspires dreams, a boy who is led by a blue bird to a murky pond where an enormous golden flower blossoms before his eyes, an astrologer who paints stars from his purple tower, a fish family that transports raindrop-jewels to a secret subterranean sea cave, a mother and baby possum who chance on a mysterious emerald-green sanctuary while seeking refuge from a sudden storm.<br><br>The tales of The Blue Forest have an innovative and artistic character that explores the genre of bedtime stories in a new way. They were conceived and composed as bedtime stories in the most emphatic sense: their vivid painterly depictions, enigmatic occurrences, and archetypal imagery make the tales resemble the non-discursive and ethereal dreamscape of sleep. The stories enliven the imagination in a way that leads the reader and listener seamlessly from the clear outlines of the waking world into the elusive realm of dreams.<br><br>The luminous illustrations by Stephanie Young and Tim Smith beautifully serve the soothing and magical qualities of the stories.