Forever Friends

This is a beautiful book in all regards by the talented Carin Berger. In the spirit of her earlier book, The Little Yellow Leaf, Forever Friends is a timeless story for all of us. Carin tells me her inspiration, “The story grew from the fact that we were (once again) leaving home for an adventure—5 months in Japan—and my daughter was struggling with leaving her friends behind, and I was too. I was thinking about how often—throughout our lives—trusting that a relationship can weather time and distance is an issue, starting really early on when a parent leaves a child with a sitter or at school.”

Carin’s illustrations are a breath of fresh air in the world of polished digital art. Starting with simply drawn sketches to establish scale and content, she cuts and pastes her final art from colored paper, magazine clippings, receipts and IRS documents. She adds touches of shading, rubber stamps and texture. Each illustration carries with it a history and soul that is rich beyond it’s obvious storytelling.

The poses and gestures of the bird and bunny (and other wildlife) are precious and make you want to live peacefully in a graph paper landscape. Just splendid.