Andrea Hensgen & Hannah Brückner
I Wish I Were a Tree
Tomorrow we will move on
A picture book about the longing to stay
A child dreams itself into the desire to be a tree. A large tree that is firmly rooted in the earth, that is alive and so strong that it provides shelter for many: for the nests of the birds, for the family of mice in the earth beneath it, for the brother’s tree house. As a tree, the child would be immovable and be one with the landscape, the wind, the night sky. It would have plenty of time to grow slowly.
Andrea Hensgen maps out the dream of a child who is not allowed to stay where it was at home. Who has to set off with his mother, father, brother and sister to a place it doesn’t know. Hannah Brückner picks up on the delicate threads, transforming the longing into bright images that are not without hope of sprouting new roots in a new place.
Peter Hammer Verlag
Picture Book
Original title: Ich wäre gern ein Baum
Age 4+
32 pp | € 18
hc | 210 x 295 mm
Publication: February 2024
Author: Andrea Hensgen
Illustrator: Hannah Brückner
All rights available
- Look inside
- Book trailer
- About the childlike desire to remain
- poetically told and illustrated
Awards
- Nomination - Serafina Newcomer Award for Illustration 2024
“Hannah Brückner approaches an old tree from a variety of perspectives – the child telling the story would love to be so stable that no one could carry it away. The way the illustrator translates the fear of moving and the longing to stay into pictures, the way she creates scenes for the cinema of the mind with just a few contour lines: masterly. In an even more minimalist way, she captures a cosmos of loneliness and homelessness in a furious penultimate picture and at the same time sets a sign of hope beyond the text: with a seedling.” – German Academy for Children’s Literature, Serafine Newcomer Illustration Award
“Brückner’s fondness for the imagination and her reflective pictorial wit have made her collaboration with author Hensgen a stroke of publishing luck. I Wish I Were a Tree is a suspenseful book that makes us think deeply about our relationship to the world.” – Christian Geyer / FAZ
“The two artists have created a touching book that takes children’s worries and wishes seriously and inspires them to fantasize.” – Karl-Heinz Behr / Eselsohr
“The metaphor of the tree is the driving force in this story and so beautifully chosen to express home, rootedness and protection as well as displacement, loss and foreignness. […] There is a great power between the lines and in the pictures that touches and inspires conversation.” – Stefanie Fischer / kinderbuchstabensuppe.de
By the same author and illustrator