Margaret Atwood's classic picture book is a perfect integration of words and pictures.

This story about the adventures of two children who live up in a tree is vintage Atwood -- playful, whimsical and wry. The perfect integration of words and pictures creates a coherent and delightful whole.

When this charming book was first published in 1978, there was a widespread idea that it was too expensive and risky to publish a children's book in Canada. And so Margaret Atwood not only wrote and illustrated the book, she handlettered the type! The book was created in the old-fashioned way, using only two colors that mixed together to produce a surprisingly large range of tones and textures. The delightful result reminds us that technology hasn't necessarily made things better. This facsimile edition renders intact the unique pleasures of the original.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.1
With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.4
Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

• Commended, CCBC Best Books for Kids & Teens
• Winner, Child Magazine Best Children's Book Award

Spare and simple, this 30-year-old title offers a refreshing return to basics.

Booklist

A delightful addition for any school, library or personal collection! Highly recommended.

Resource Links

...little people will...become enchanted by the sounds and cadence of the words in Up in The Tree.

Globe and Mail

The lyrical, rhyming text will delight even the youngest children, and early readers will be able to read the book independently. Highly recommended.

Resource Links

This could be a collectible - not just because it's Atwood. Because it still rocks....a gem of a book.

New Brunswick Telegraph

...a whimsical story of two big-eyed kids who, indeed, live in a tree....for those who think Atwood can't do cute, think again.

Calgary Herald