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Richie's Picks: OPERATION REDWOOD by S.  Terrell French, Amulet, Earth Day 
2009, 368p., ISBN:  978-0-8109-8354-0
 
 
"We need wilderness preserved -- as much of it as is still  left, and as many 
kinds -- because it was the challenge against which our  character as a 
people was formed.  The remainder and the reassurance that  it is still there is 
good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten  years set foot in 
it.  It is good for us when we are young, because of the  incomparable sanity it 
can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane  lives.  It is 
important to us when we are old simply because it is there --  important, that is, 
simply as idea."
-- Wallace Stegner, 1961
 
"How I love this happy place,
This healing place...I love  it
How I love this peaceful place
This place with wings."
-- Joanne Rand
 



"The computer beeped.  Julian glanced at the screen, and  saw a message so 
astonishing that he sprayed ginger ale out his nose and all  across his uncle's 
computer screen.  
 
"The subject of the newest e-mail read: 'SIBLEY CARTER IS A  MORON AND A 
WORLD CLASS JERK!!!'"
 
Susannah T. French, environmental lawyer-turned-first-time  children's book 
author and Left Coast member of the "Class of 2K9," cites  Elaine Konigsburg 
and Jean Craighead George amongst her own childhood reading  influences.  In 
OPERATION REDWOOD -- which takes place in my neck of the  woods -- French employs 
the cleverness of Konigsburg and the reverence of George  in a hijinx-laden 
activist tale of two boys and a girl who plot to protect a  privately-owned 
grove of old growth redwoods from being clear cut by a  corporation.
 
 
"'Today, experts estimate that about 4 percent of the original  redwood 
forest remains.'
"Julian frowned.  He pictured ninety-six giant trunks  lying on the forest 
floor and only four trees left standing.  That  couldn't be right."
 
Julian Carter-Li has been having a truly miserable time of  things since his 
mother departed San Francisco on her  grant-underwritten photography trip to 
China.  Julian has been stuck in  the nightmarish care of his wealthy paternal 
aunt and uncle -- a very  Dursley-ish duo.  (His aunt employs a point system 
to supposedly motivate  his behavior with incentives.  He is now at NEGATIVE 
twenty-something  and sinking fast.)  And so it is that on a long afternoon and  
evening when he is under the weather and left alone, to wait for hours  and 
hours in Uncle Sibley's corporate office, that Julian stumbles  upon the 
insulting, aforementioned, UNOPENED e-mail on his uncle's  computer.  Opening (and 
then deleting) the email, Julian learns that  his uncle is planning to 
clear-cut some place called Big Tree  Grove. 
 
When Julian and his best bud Danny Lopez decide to reply  to the insulting 
email, they learn that the author is Robin Elder, a girl living a couple of 
hours north  of San Francisco, who will be personally impacted -- devastated by 
the loss of  her family's Eden -- if Uncle Sibley's plan is successful.  As the 
e-mails  begin flying back and forth, Julian and Danny decide to secretly join 
 forces with Robin to attempt the impossible.


 
"He tried to imagine how the land might have looked five  hundred years 
earlier, when the Miwok Indians lived there."
 
I can remember how, as a teenager, I would sometimes play the  game that 
Julian plays -- imagining what a place looked like  before developments and strip 
malls and the asphalt roads that connect one  strip mall to the next.  Of 
course, at my age I don't have to  imagine.  I am quite aware of the changes -- 
for the worse -- that have, in  my own lifetime, taken place.
 
 
Shouldn't we be asking ourselves -- assuming that it is  not already too late 
-- whether or not it matters that such species as the  Black rhinoceros, the 
Bactrian camel, the Giant panda, or the Blue whale  still roam the Earth when 
humanity reaches the future inhabited by our  children's children's children.  
Does it matter whether or not our  descendents have the opportunities I have 
had to stroll through groves of  trees that seem to reach to the sky and that 
date back to Columbus and the Magna  Carta and Kublai Khan?  Whether one is 
young or old, such questions  can so easily fall between the cracks amongst the 
day-to-day demands  of living our lives.  

 
OPERATION REDWOOD will surely get some kids  wondering how much of Earth's 
fragile beauty and diversity future  generations will be required to experience 
as no more than a  figment of the imagination.  Hopefully Julian, Danny, and  
Robin's take-charge, good-hearted activism will rub off on readers and  have 
them thinking about speaking their own minds when they are faced  with the 
destruction of their natural  inheritance.     

Richie  Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks

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