Enchantress from the Stars author. It won the 1990 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. The award is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity. A new American hardcover edition was issued by Walker and Company in 2001 with a foreword by Lois Lowry and afterword by the author. Next year it was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year Award in the Rediscovery category. Engdahl wrote
Trees in mythology The world tree, with its branches reaching up into the sky, and roots deep into the earth, can be seen to dwell in three worlds - a link between heaven, the earth, and the underworld, uniting above and below. This great tree acts as an Axis mundi, supporting or holding up the cosmos, and providing a link between the heavens, earth, and underworld. In European mythology, the best-known example is the tree Yggdrasil from Norse mythology. Numerous popular stories throughout the world reflect a firmly-rooted belief in an intimate connection between a human being and a tree, plant or flower.