But as she breaks into a run to catch up, Kikko trips into the deep snow and falls, crushing the pie box.ĭevastated, she picks up the box and runs after her father, following him to a strange big house she hadn’t noticed before. Eager to help, Kikko grabs the pie-box and runs after him through the winter wonderland, following his tracks through the woods.Īt last, she spots ahead of her a silhouette in a hat and a long black coat. We meet young Kikko, who awakens one morning to find that her father has left for Grandma’s house but has forgotten the pie he was supposed to bring. At the story’s heart is a gentle taunt at the line between what is real and what is imagined - a line we cross daily in ways minute and monumental by virtue of continually constructing the thing we call reality. Japanese children’s book author and artist Akiko Miyakoshi explores this profoundly human impulse with uncommon subtlety and tenderness in The Tea Party in the Woods ( public library) - a quietly whimsical modernist fairy tale with the imaginative other-worldliness of Alice in Wonderland, but without Carroll’s flamboyant farcicality with the red-capped woods-wandering heroine of Little Red Riding Hood, but without the Grimms’ goriness. To be human is to sometimes slip, then wish for a way to undo our mishaps and magically fix our mistakes.
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