The Forest Master: Heartwood
The hero who finds herself on this journey through the heartwood is Flidais Fiore, aka Flea, a bright, plucky, feisty-filled teen living in near-future LA. Flea, with a penchant for making up wackle-dackle words and “thinking up things” is trying to figure out how to save a beloved neighborhood oak from the whirring teeth of robotic lumberjacks and buzzing blades of cutting drones, while she struggles to figure out what it means to be herself.
With just days to save the oak from “treeicide”, Flea’s mother guilts Flea into paying a visit to shamanic, vision-questing Grandma Willow in a tumbledown pile of a house in the forests of Connecticut. Like Alice and Dorothy before her, Flea then takes an unexpected journey when she falls headlong into a tree hollow, landing in the unheard-of-realm of the ancient, arboreal Forest Master. Relentlessly pursued by this feral spirit-lord of the woods, Flea’s only companion is her great-great-great-great grandmother’s occasionally helpful, often grumpy, and always opinionated, diary. Flea must brave this sometimes arduous, sometimes joyful, and sometimes terrifying path to get back home, a path that takes her through a mythical, mystical world of singing root choruses, conceited fruit trees, extinct wildwoods, and commanding conifers. Each one teaches Flea lessons both about themselves and the life-ending environmental threats that beset them. In that learning, Flea discovers not only that each type of tree is not a something but a someone whose life force deserves respect but also discovers her own strength of body and depth of being.
Finally, upon the awakening of an expansive, golden green light of caring within her own heart, she climbs the Tree of Life, returning home. In a final confrontation with the machines of destruction in her own world, Flea leads a brave defense force of neighborhood kids and not only saves the beloved oak but becomes the hero of her own life.