The Forest Keeper, is non-fiction that’s tough to believe and inspiring to ponder

While his name might not be on the tip of your tongue, you know the story of Jadav Payeng. He’s the Indian teenager who in 1979, started planting seeds on an abandoned, arid, desolate riverbank where nothing had ever grown before. Every day he returned to the area to plant new seeds and water the existing ones. Over time his trees turned into a thicket and then a forest, which eventually attracted insects, then the birds that consume (or live symbiotically with) them. The Forest Keeper is an illustrated book that tells this story in a manner that makes this stranger-than-fiction story grounded and very much in a matter-of-fact.

That is not a bad thing. Young audiences need to experience stories where the lead character does big, seemingly impossible, world-changing things that are actually measurable. What Payeng did was alter an eco system for the better, simply by being aware of a problem and doing something on a repeated basis until a forest sprung up around his feet. He didn’t have any seed propagation machines, advanced agriculture degrees, it was just him and The Forest Keeper does a great job in capturing the scale of his accomplishments.

It’s a lushly illustrated book that tells an epic tale that operates on many levels. The illustrations are by Ishita Jain and vary their size, scope and areas of interest in ways that maintain the curiosity and focus of young audiences. The white space on certain pages is used to accentuate the desolation and disbelief that he encounters when he starts his idea. He goes to the elders and then the forest department and they’re shown simply pointing at others or holding their arms up, feigning frustration. It’s a very quick, effective, one-page demonstration the ineptitude that people associate with bureaucracy, even when it’s an high-interest topic that’s being presented by a 16-year-old.

At the end of that meeting the forest officials simply give him a bag of seeds and tell him to plant them himself. This is where the book really takes off because Payeng goes back to that area where nothing has ever grown and plants a couple of seeds. As his seeds start to grow into bamboo trees the white space returns to illuminate and exemplify the increased variety of seeds that he intentionally brings in. Thanks to the wind and rain, these fruit-bearing seeds are spread across the island. When these new varieties start to take root the island is rewarded with another way of spreading the seeds, birds.

The birds beget the bigger animals and seemingly everything is great with this new found land, what could go wrong? One night the elephants came on the island searching for food and scare the villagers, much like the china shop that a bull might roam through. The villagers are up in arms, demanding that part of the forest be cut down in an effort to stop attracting the massive wildlife.

When the animals left, as part of their migration, he hoped that they’d return, and planted more fruit-bearing trees to entice them. To his, and eventually, the villagers delight, they did come back and still do every year. I assume that the key points in The Forest Keeper are true, specifically the fact that he was rebuffed as a 16-year-old and that the villagers wanted to chop swaths of the forest down after the first bad thing associated with it happened. It makes for a fabulous story that seems destined for cinema.

The presentation in The Forest Keeper is short enough to hook those reluctant readers who are digging into it themselves. Some of the words might trip up those younger ones, but it’s designed to be read to young audiences. After it’s read to them once they might not know words like “shriveled” or “thicket”, but they’ll be able to infer what they mean due to the simple nature of the book. Going one step further, even if those audiences aren’t able to read at all, they can simply look at the illustrations and essentially know what’s going on.

The Forest Keeper is an illustrated book whose easygoing nature will charm readers right out of the gate. They’ll be curious as to why a teenager could care about dead snakes on a river bank. They might wonder why he cares about the lack of trees in the first place. Some folks will compare this book to The Boy Who Grew a Forrest, and rightly so, they both have the same characters and tell the same tale. For us, The Forest Keeper has more of an organic feel to the story. It completely tells Payeng’s story, from the beginning to the time when the forest had grown into something massive. The book also has a postscript of sorts that’s written at a slightly higher reading level that provides further details and a short glimpse at Payeng’s life now.

The Forest Keeper: The True Story of Jadav Payeng is by Rina Singh with illustrations by Ishita Jain and is published by NorthSouth Books, Inc. and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

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