When I read 'In The Land Where Beetles Rule' by Suniti Namjoshi and illustrated by Krishna Bala Shenoi (Pratham Books), the words of global activist Kumi Naidoo from a recent episode of The Subverse podcast came to mind "The planet does not need saving. If we continue on the path that we are on, we will be gone. The planet will still be here."

It's a sobering thought. We do talk of the planet's future and humankind's future interchangeably as though they are one and the same. But unless a 'Don't Look Up!' situation presents itself, humans or no humans, the planet will most likely still be here. This book explores what that might look like.

A post-human world (though there is one spread in which humans still abound, setting everything on fire, driving animals underground) in which nature takes over. Ships are marooned in deserts. Cities are submerged underwater. Animals hunt in a reverse food chain.

I read this book over and over again, each time asking myself new question or finding something new to notice in Shenoi's stunning art. I was also troubled. Do we need a post-human (and post-apocalypse?) picture book for children? When we watched the Tom Hanks film Finch last year with the kids, it's safe to say they were somewhat traumatised by the scorched, desolate planet it's set in. When Finch's robot gets destroyed they were in tears and begged us to stop the movie, worried that his dog would be the next to go, unable or unwilling to accept that this could be a possible future.

When I asked my 14 year old to read The Land Where the Beetles Rule, he was entranced by the art, and had plenty of questions and ideas about what the text was trying to convey.

"Whose feet may not touch the ground?" he said at the start. For him, the spread "In the land where mice are men..." for him symbolised a reverse food chain. He saw the book as a reversal of the way things are now. He pointed out that the trees had grown to bind the axes to them. He was sobered by the idea of a full moon reigning.

I recently finished Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, in which almost the entire planet's population is wiped out by a pandemic. The world as we know it comes to a grinding halt, and those who have survived set up small communes and come to some way of 'new normal'. As beautiful as it is, it's not an easy book to read. I feel the same way about this picture book, beautiful, complicated, hard, but so very necessary and thought provoking.