The vast boreal forests – the “lungs of the world” circling the north from Canada and Alaska through Asia, Europe, and Scotland – are crucial to the planet’s health. To look after them, we need to know as much about them as possible. In a book designed to be both informative and beautiful, Jane Drake and Ann Love take us deep into the woods. The text conveys a sense of wonder along with its many facts, and British Columbia painter Andrew Kiss’s lovingly detailed paintings, in the style of Robert Bateman, teem with life.

Drake and Love have good credentials as nature writers: Drake is a founding member of Pollution Probe, and both women – sisters as well as co-authors – collaborated on The Kids Cottage Book and The Kids Winter Cottage Book. Their new book embraces natural history, science, and ethnohistory, and issues calls to action. The magazine format and lively, upbeat language help offset the density of information. The authors play successfully on kids’ fascination with fierce and extinct animals but their retold folk tales don’t work as well, and that young Sami woman singing about nursing reindeer and ripening cloudberries is a little too weird.

Some of the action points demand a political sophistication surely beyond most preteens: buying recycled paper is easy; lobbying against “unnecessary new roads” using community bulletin boards and web sites isn’t. Technical concepts like resource extraction, carbon sinks, and animal migration may also require adult help to unzip. However, the authors provide a glossary, an index, and an indispensable map for this intriguing trip, and many young readers will be inspired to find out more.