The Wild Life: A Berry Long Walk by Laura and Philip Bunting

Title: The Wild Life: A Berry Long Walk

Author: Laura and Philip Bunting

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st May 2022

Format: Paperback

Pages: 160

Price: $15.99

Synopsis: Wombat won’t leave his Safety Zone. Nope. No way! Not even for his favourite treat – sweet, sweet bush berries.

But Roo believes she can do anything if she puts her mind to it. Especially tracking down some delicious berries for dinner. Even if those berries do happen to be growing at the very top of a massive mountain…

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About The Wild Life.

The Wild Life is a new series of chapter books for picture book aficionados.

We Buntings love picture books (everyone knows that!), our only quibble is that they’re often over way too soon. Our aim for the Wild Life series was to apply picture book principles (E.g., fewer words, full illustrations, fun!) to a long-format children’s book. The result is a berry long picture book! Set out over eight chapters and a whopping 160 pages, The Berry Long Walk is a story for any picture book purists ready to take a step up.

The Wild Life: A Berry Long Walk is illustrated by Philip Bunting, and is published in Australia by Scholastic (May 2022). The second book in the Wild Life series is due for publication in September 2022.

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Wombat doesn’t want to leave his Safety Zone around his burrow, but the drought has depleted the food sources around his home. His best friend Roo is sure that she has found the berries they both like – but they have to climb a big mountain. Wombat is scared but Roo is there to help him and encourage him. Yet something unexpected awaits them at the top of the mountain. And so, Roo and Wombat set out on a journey across the bush to find food and something they didn’t know existed.

The team behind this series is Laura and Phil Bunting, a writer and illustrator team. Laura has created the inviting and delightful story about two friends going on a journey together where one has to overcome fears and worries, yet they both get to help each other at various stages, and this builds on their lovely friendship and bond. It is also very Australia, evoking the bush and our marsupials in an anthropomorphic way. Whilst it’s not a story that we can all see our experiences in, it is a story that celebrates friendship, challenging yourself and taking a journey that will build skills. Laura’s lovely story is accompanied images from Phil Bunting in full colour just like a picture book. This isn’t a graphic novel, but more like a picture book in a novel format, as it has a longer story. I think doing it this way was very effective because it allowed for the scope of the story that Laura wanted to tell to be expressed in the best way possible. And, I think it is a great book for reluctant readers as well as confident readers. As an adult reader, I think is a lovely story that readers of all ages can enjoy, because I feel like it has universal themes about fear, encouragement, friendship, cooperation, and is such a fantastic way to move from shorter picture books into other fiction, as it bridges the gap of content and length in a clever and delightful way that many can enjoy.

There are lots of levels and layers to this story as well, and depending on how you are reading it, and what you are reading it for, you will get something different out of it, and that’s why this book is so good – because everyone will get something different and find what they need in the story. I think this is a great start to the series and it would be awesome to see where it goes from here.