An acorn falls, and fourteen board pages later it is an oak big enough to shelter more than two thousand kinds of living thing. That is the whole idea, and a two year old can follow it on the first read.

What makes it work is the cutting. Every page carries a shaped hole, so the sapling on this page is already showing through the one before it. Small hands find the hole before they find the words, and the guessing is the reading lesson. Lesley Sims keeps the text to a line or two a page; Emma Allen fills the rest with squirrels, beetles and weather.

Board throughout, so it survives the reader it is written for.