In the forests of Venezuela a fugitive from a failed revolution hears a voice in the trees - a girl the Indians will not go near and mean to kill, who speaks a language nobody knows and moves through the canopy like something the forest made. Hudson was born on the Argentine pampas to American settlers, came to England at thirty-three and lived years in poverty; he was a naturalist first, and the forest here is real even when Rima is not.

W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) was a British writer and naturalist, born in Argentina to American parents. He settled in England in 1874, where he wrote the novels Green Mansions and A Crystal Age, along with numerous studies of the English countryside and South American wildlife.