This is a darling picture book by Oliver Jeffers.
It's the story of some forest animals who gradually notice that some of their tree limbs are missing.
And then, later, one whole tree.
The forest animals are pretty upset. They're definitely in the "What is Happening!!?" mode.
They accuse each other.
But everyone has a watertight alibi.
One day, one of them sees a bear shooting paper airplanes. He tells the others. They all go down to the phone booth to phone the police.
The bear is arrested. When he testifies from the stand, he breaks down and confesses that he did it, and all because he comes from a long line of paper airplane champions and another big competition was coming up, he wasn't doing well in his preparation, and he'd run out of paper.
He promised he'd plant new trees to make up for what he'd done, and he did. The other animals helped him.
Perhaps the tragedy of losing a big paper airplane competition is not immediately apparent, but what makes it is the illustrations. They're amusing, whimsical and complicated.
My favorite illustration is of the face-down plant the owl makes when he comes in for a landing and "Oops!" his branch isn't there.
I can imagine children wanting to discuss and ask questions about the illustrations, especially the illustration of everyone's "airtight" alibi (they're all alone: one is sleeping, one is watching TV, one is doing the laundry).
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