Alive with energy and joined by a fox and a cat, it wanders the forest, is set afire, is eaten by a snake and a shark, and much more.
When a piece of lightning hits it, a branch falls. It begins with a falling star, crashing to the earth, where a tree eventually grows. "Here, Sanna focuses on the piece of wood that eventually becomes the marionette, as if the wood is the toy’s very soul. Powerful and strange, this picture book invites contemplation." ―Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
"In the mostly wordless pages of Pinocchio: The Origin Story (Enchanted Lion, 48 pages, $19.95), exquisite paintings by the Italian watercolorist Alessandro Sanna depict a series of mystical events that produced the bit of wood that the woodcarver Geppetto would eventually fashion into a marionette―which became a real boy―in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story ‘Pinocchio’. "In the astonishingly beautiful and tenderhearted Pinocchio: The Origin Story, Sanna imagines an alternative prequel to the beloved story, a wordless genesis myth of the wood that became Pinocchio, radiating a larger cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity between the two.A fitting follow-up to The River-Sanna’s exquisite visual memoir of life on the Po River in Northern Italy, reflecting on the seasonality of human existence-this imaginative masterwork dances with the cosmic unknowns that eclipse human life and the human mind with their enormity: questions like what life is, how it began, and what happens when it ends." -Maria Popova, Brain Pickings It’s a haunting and wholly original perspective on Collodi’s classic that suggests that Pinocchio’s mischievous spirit draws from a primordial, even immortal, source of energy." ―STARRED REVIEW, Publishers Weekly ★ "Alternating between panels and full- and double-page scenes whose bright, bleeding colors evoke tie-dyed fabrics, Sanna shows the proto-Pinocchio gathering companions and confronting a forest of trees and fire, a ravenous snake, and an enormous shark, before growing into a tree. A Brain Pickings Best Children’s Book of 2016