Review of The Green Lady by Lisa Picard

Sometimes, urban life can be hard and annoying. In this case, it is better leave everything and seek another lifestyle.  This is the central plot of a book titled “The Green Lady: Magical Tales from the Forest to Enchant your Inner-Child”. The author of the book is Lisa Picard, a blogger and writer who lives in Africa. This marvelous continent is the main character of the book that opens with the story of Peter Allen, a successful journalist who, one day, realizes he needs to change his life and find his real self. And so, Peter resigns from his job and decides to write a book about some strange legends surrounding the mountains in the Knysna Area, an ancient forested place in South Africa. The end of Peter is the one to collect stories about people who have changed their life after meeting a spirit of the forest called “ The Green Lady”. With this purpose, Peter undertakes a hard hike in the forest, to come across, from time to time, people who really changed their life after seeing the magical Green Lady. But who is this Lady? A ghost, a spirit, a guardian of the forest? Is it due to these questions( that Peter asks during his adventure) that the book takes the tone of a magical and relaxing fairy tale suitable for each kind of reader. The book is not a novel, and not even a fiction, I would say it is a sort of journalistic and biographical account of a writer who really decided to leave her normal life to build a new home in one the most awesome forests in the world. Spectacular sights, fantastic landscapes, glimmering waterfalls, tiny and winged creatures dancing on the trees of the forest, make this book really unique and original. As I just said, this is not a novel, maybe almost a fiction, because the African landscapes exist really, but the style of writing is closely journalistic. What makes the book a fiction is the character of the Green Lady, a fairy and beautiful woman who appears only wrapped in a long dress of green hair. The Green Lady rewards those people who love and respect the natural environment and punishes those that spoil and pollute nature, flowers and plants. Her talks are highly meaningful because aimed to help people to find their true being. At the end of the book, readers can’t discover if the Green Lady exists really in Africa, but one thing is sure: they’ll find out a strong desire to visit the magical forest in Africa. This book unveils a new point of view about life, where everyone is only a part of everything: matters, molecules and spirits belong to the same power and energy. Perhaps, this book also contains an interesting message to start appreciating the poetical side of life. Magical and fairy can be retrieved only by learning to keep in touch with nature and naturalness that are also inside and around us.