Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“I dream with Popo as she rocks me in her arms. She sings, ‘Beibei xin, beibei gan.’
In my heart I hear: My baby, my heart. My baby, my love.”
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I’m following up Thursday’s post about the tight bond and transcendent love between a granddaughter and grandmother with another post about the same. Today, it’s Livia Blackburne’s I Dream of Popo (Roaring Brook, January 2021), illustrated by Julia Kuo. And it is lovely.

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I’m going to share here, before you take in these spectacular illustrations, the first paragraph of author Katie McCabe’s closing Author’s Note from We Wait for the Sun (Roaring Brook, February 2021), illustrated by Raissa Figueroa, as it perfectly captures what it is this book has to offer ….

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“Maybe you can’t really know anyone just by looking at their face.”

Wise words from Milo Imagines the World (Putnam, February 2021), written by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson.

I’ve got a review of this one over at BookPage. That is here, and below are some spreads.

Enjoy!

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A fair has come to town. A group of animals, watching from the nearby treeline, sees humans setting it up. As night falls, they continue to watch as people filter in. They watch from the shadows, taking in the bright lights and constant movement. (It’s here you can almost smell the funnel cakes.) But after the people filter out and the fair is closed for the night? Well, the creatures make their way in and experience all the fair has to offer.

Wanna see a couple spreads from Gideon Sterer’s The Midnight Fair (Candlewick, February 2021), illustrated by Mariachiara Di Giorgio? It is captivating.

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“Nicky set up an office in a hotel in Prague. He made lists of children. …”
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Over at BookPage, I’ve got a review of Peter Sís’s Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued (Norton Young Readers, January 2021). That review is here.

I also had the pleasure of asking him some questions about this remarkable book. That Q&A is here.

Below are some spreads from the book.

(And if you’re wanting more Sís today: Here is my 2019 7-Imp interview with him, and here is an excellent NPR piece, posted yesterday, about the new book.) Read the rest of this entry �

 
“One day, Haneru Sato became a rabbit. He’s been a rabbit ever since.” Thus opens Yuki Ainoya’s Sato the Rabbit (Enchanted Lion), a Japanese picture book import (originally published in 2006) coming to shelves in February. This remarkably child-friendly story, clocking in at nearly 60 pages, is a treat.

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How about a Dutch picture book import today? Let’s take a look at some spreads from Where Is the Dragon? (Gecko, February 2021) from Belgian author-illustrator Leo Timmers. It’s the story of a king who orders three knights — One, Two, and Three — to rid the kingdom of a menacing dragon.

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In the introduction to her book, Latinitas: Celebrating 40 Big Dreamers (Godwin Books/Henry Holt, February 2021), author/illustrator Juliet Menéndez writes that she wishes she had, as a child, discovered the women she features in this book. She adds: “When I first had the idea … I was working as an art teacher in Upper Manhattan. Like me, most of the students at the time were bicultural and had families from places like the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. But as I walked through the halls, the posters on the walls were of historical figures like Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Dalí. I asked myself: What if some fresh, new faces, that looked more like my students, were up on these walls?” This was the birth of her book, which features women from all over Latin America and the U.S. and includes life stories that go back as far as the 17th century.

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It’s a pleasure to have a chat today with author-illustrator Matthew Cordell about his newest picture book, Bear Island (Feiwel and Friends, January 2021), a moving story about loss and working one’s way through the emotions involved. It’s a story that, as the Publisher’s Weekly review puts it so well, “respects grief’s slow pace.”

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Would you like to take a look at an Argentinian import? Today, I’ve got some spreads from Yael Frankel’s The Elevator, originally published in 2019 in Argentina and translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude. It comes from Tapioca Stories, a New York-based publisher that brings readers Latin American children’s books, originally written in Spanish and Portuguese.

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