Into the Woods shows us the healing power of nature through a story set in the New Zealand bush. This candid yet unexpectedly beautiful little book follows the journey a grieving mother goes through after losing a child. Feeling alienated from the people around her she physically and emotionally retreats into the bush where she forms a new and, for her, unlikely attachment to the native birds. The story starts with a woman sitting alone on her lawn. The flowers and visitors have stopped arriving and her husband has returned to work, leaving her to grieve for her lost baby alone. She opens a flyer newly arrived in the mail and sees pictures of native birds - the tui, the riroriro, the kereru - and having no one else to talk to starts to form a relationship with them. 'It was during the spring the kaka arrived that I first noticed a grey warbler fledgling outside my window who couldn't get the tune quite right. He'd start singing, get a note wrong and falter, then try tentatively again. Like a child learning the recorder, I thought. Like a child ... '