Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

It’s the first Sunday of the month (happy March!), which means it’s time to feature a student or debut illustrator here at 7-Imp. Today, I welcome Hanna Cha, whose debut picture book — Tiny Feet Between the Mountains (Simon & Schuster) — was released last Fall. (Pictured above is the book’s title page illustration.)

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I’m breaking my own rules again here at 7-Imp. Normally, I feature illustration students on the first Sunday of each month, but hey, I feel like featuring one day. So I am.

Meet Mel Valentine Vargas! They are, as they will tell you at their site, a Chicago-based Latinx illustrator and comics-creator. Mel, as explained below, is currently attending Columbia College Chicago, studying illustration and animation. Mel likes inking illustrations with brush pen work, and they also enjoy exploring new ways to detail and texture their work digitally.

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“I wrote Just Like a Mama to celebrate and affirm adopted children. I also wrote it to acknowledge the aunts, grandmothers, and
big sisters who cheerfully care for children not their own.”

Over at Tennessee’s Chapter 16, I talk to author Alice Faye Duncan about her newest picture book, Just Like a Mama (Denene Millner Books, January 2020), illustrated by Charnelle Pinkney Barlow.

My chat with Duncan is here. (Note: Barlow actually visited 7-Imp last year to talk about making the illustrations for this, her debut picture book. That post is here.)

Enjoy!

“…Flory played the songs of her Nona, and they helped her feel closer to home.”

 
I’m happy to be a part of the Association of Jewish Libraries’ 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour with a visit today from author Debbie Levy. Levy won a Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Picture Book Category for The Key from Spain (Kar-Ben, August 2019), illustrated by Sonja Wimmer.

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“She grows thinner and slower. She loses her hair. Her wings fray and tatter. Summertime bees do not live long. And Apis is now thirty-five days old. She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.”
(Click to enlarge and see spread, including the text, in its entirety)

 
Bzz. Bzz. Today, I’ve got some spreads from Candace Fleming’s and Eric Rohmann’s newest book for young readers, Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera (Neal Porter/Holiday House, February 2020). Eric also shares some preliminary images and shows us how to un-angry a bee.

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Today, author-illustrator Hannah Salyer visits to share some preliminary images and final art from her debut picture book, Packs: Strength in Numbers, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (See how I hyperlinked her name to her website, by the way? It will improve your day significantly to go check out the art there at her beautiful site.)

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“Inside, the boy heard the tale of the Israelites leaving Egypt.
Outside, the kitten heard leaves whispering in the trees.
Still the boy waited. Still the kitten waited.”
(Click to enlarge spread)

 
Today, illustrator Susan Gal visits to share some work-in-process images and final art from her illustrations for Lesléa Newman’s Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail, coming to shelves from Charlesbridge at the end of this month.

It’s the first night of Passover, and a family welcomes their friends and family to a Seder. From inside the house, a young boy spots a kitten outdoors. A compassionate story unfolds, one of the traditions of a Jewish holiday, happening indoors, and a small stray kitten, doing his best to survive outside. How the boy and the kitten meet — and how the kitten finds a home and a name — is the heart of this story. Appended are an author’s note, providing more information about Passover, and a list of some traditional rituals of a Seder. Read the rest of this entry �

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Over at Tennessee’s Chapter 16, I’ve a Q&A with author Rita Lorraine Hubbard about her picture book biography, The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read (Schwartz & Wade, January 2020), illustrated by Oge Mora.

That Q&A is here.

And here at 7-Imp today, I’m including some of Mora’s illustrations from the book.

Enjoy!

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“It’s always lucky to find someone who understands you, and that’s why Henry and Bea were the best of friends.” Thus opens Jessixa Bagley’s Henry and Bea (Neal Porter/Holiday House, October 2019), the emotionally resonant story of how to truly be there for a friend. Jessixa visits 7-Imp today to talk a bit about the book and share some early sketches.

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You all know I like to wax rhapsodic about picture books here at 7-Imp. Well, I also review for the Horn Book. And for them, this year, I reviewed Barbara McClintock’s playful and fast-paced (as in, zippy fast) Vroom! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2019), one of my favorites of 2019. Perhaps one day they will post that review online, but suffice it to say that this is the dynamic tale of Annie, a girl who loves race cars. She lives for speed, and she sets out one day in her race car to take a grand adventure — a journey mostly of the imagination (and it’s a big one), given that in a mighty short span of time she zips all across the country. It’s a spectacular page-turner of a story, featuring indelible images from McClintock (just look at Annie’s hair flying behind her), as well as a pitch-perfect text with not a wasted word.

Again, I’ve more thoughts in my review (and if it is ever posted online, I’ll come link to it here), but for now Barbara visits to share some preliminary images and final art — and to say a bit about what prompted this story. Hint: It has four wheels. (EDITED TO ADD: The review has since been posted online. It is here.)

I thank her for visiting today.

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