Within our 21st century world of global warming, increasing resource pressures and unprecedented technological advances, the idyllic and utopian natural worlds of rolling hills, helpful wildlife and perfect forests that are often seen in Disney animations and children's story books, seem worlds away. Yet children who grow up in these technology-filled, chaotic and mixed up realities are still often coupled with romantic ideas of Nature. Nature and children are often presented as perfect partners, both exemplars of purity and goodness. These ideas have become so engrained within Western educational, literary and scholarly forms, that they have naturalised and self-legitimised the nature/culture divide. Dualistic ideas do not allow for other notions of childhood or nature that do not fit within these romantic forms. It is exactly these inconsistencies that Affrica Taylor sets out to explore and rework in Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. The compelling approach of this book encourages educators and scholars to loosen their grip on an idealised natural childhood that is sickly saturated with ideas of purity and innocence and embrace a "motley collection of less familiar and non-innocent on-the-ground-natures" (p. xv).