By Wendy Pfeffer
An oak falls in a storm, and the book follows the log for two hundred years while it slowly rots down into the soil that grows the next oak.
A big oak comes down in a windstorm. That is page one, and everything after it is what happens to the log. Carpenter ants get in first. Then termites, a click beetle, fungi spreading through the wet wood. A porcupine chews the bark off. Rain gets down into the tunnels, frost splits them wider, and the whole thing goes soft. Slugs and millipedes and a salamander move in. Over pages that cover decades, the log stops being a log and becomes a low dark mound, and then it is just forest floor. Then an acorn lands on it and grows. Robin Brickman built every picture out of hand-painted paper, cut and shaped and glued into three dimensions and then photographed, so the fungi look like you could pull them off the page.
Most habitats books cover producers and consumers and stop there. This one shows decomposition, which is really just the answer to where dead things go. It follows one process the whole way through, beginning to end: the log breaks apart, an acorn lands on what is left of it, and the loop closes where it started. It is a big idea carried without a single hard sentence, and some children will see where it is headed a few pages before Pfeffer says it.