Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

 
In the mood for a French holiday import? Today, I’ve got some spreads from Nathalie Dargent’s The Christmas Feast (Eerdmans, August 2020), illustrated by Magali Le Huche. It’s a book the author says is inspired by her admiration for Scheherazade and her appetite for good food.

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“Big or small, the task would suit Nate either way ….”
(Click to enlarge spread and read text in its entirety)

 

Today, I’ve got some illustrations from The Hanukkah Magic of Nate Gadol (Candlewick, September 2020), a new picture book from Arthur A. Levine and Kevin Hawkes. This is what Levine describes as a pourquoi tale about the tradition of presents at Hanukkah. (You can read or listen here to a wonderful NPR interview with Levine about the book.)

Nate Gadol is Levine’s original mythical creation — a “great big spirit,” pictured above, who makes things stretch for families in need. He made a “tiny bit of oil last eight days and nights in the far-off long ago,” but he also will keep your flower fresh for longer, keep a dam strong in a storm, or even help you hold a long note while singing — if your life depended on it.

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Follow this girl’s binoculars (by hitting “Read the rest of this entry” below), and you’ll meet some beautiful birds in Jane Yolen’s Knowing the Name of a Bird (Creative Editions, August 2020), illustrated by Jori van der Linde.

It’s been a lousy year. We need to take in some beautiful birds, right?

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Lucky for me, things are coming up very Julie today at 7-Imp.

Author Julie Larios and author-illustrator Julie Paschkis (both language lovers) visit today to talk briefly about their newest picture book, Eek!: A Noisy Journey from A to Z (Peachtree, September 2020).

I reviewed this one for the Horn Book, and I don’t think that review will publish till later. But in summary: This is a mighty entertaining alphabet adventure. It is wordless, with the exception of some onomatopoeia and animal sounds. The adventure begins with a sneezing mouse (A is for “achoo”) and ends with that mouse falling asleep safely (Z is for “ZzZzZ”) — and in between there are buzzing bees, chirping birds, a cat, a dog who likes to chase cats, a raccoon on a bike, a pig in a sleek car, a harrumph’ing alligator, a bike accident, some tears but much joy, a parade, a lion (with a mane just right for snuggling mice), and much more.

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Let’s take a look today at A Year of Everyday Wonders (Abrams, December 2020), written by Cheryl B. Klein and illustrated by Qin Leng. I reviewed this one over here at BookPage, if you’d like to read more about it. It’s a charmer.

Here today at 7-Imp are some of the book’s illustrations …

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— From Gijs van der Hammen’s Little Wise Wolf, illustrated by Hanneke Siemensma

 

— From Jairo Buitrago’s Cave Paintings, illustrated by Rafael Yockteng

 
You may have heard that the New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Awards have been canceled this year (because of the pandemic). I look forward to that list ever year. At the Horn Book earlier this week, Martha V. Parravano and I were joined by Julie Roach (Manager of Youth Services at Cambridge Public Library and Chair of last year’s Caldecott committee) to pretend we were our OWN three-person committee and imagine which best illustrated children’s books we would have awarded this year. If you’re so inclined to read that, it’s here. And please come join the conversation. Which 2020 books would you have chosen?

Here today at 7-Imp, I’ve got some illustrations from two of those books — Gijs van der Hammen’s Little Wise Wolf (Kids Can Press, September 2020), a Dutch import illustrated by Hanneke Siemensma and translated by Laura Watkinson, and Jairo Buitrago’s Cave Paintings (Groundwood, October 2020), illustrated by Rafael Yockteng and translated by Elisa Amado. And don’t miss this Horn Book Q&A with Jairo and Rafael.

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Today, I’m featuring one of my favorite picture books of 2020 — Matthew Burgess’s The Bear and the Moon (Chronicle, September 2020), illustrated by Cátia Chien.

My Horn Book review of the book is here, if you’d like to read more about it.

And here today at 7-Imp, I’ve got some of the book’s beautiful spreads. Cátia also visits to share some early sketches and partial storyboards. I thank her for sharing.

Enjoy!

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Jason Chin’s newest picture book, Your Place in the Universe (Neal Porter Books/Holiday House, September 2020), is the kind of book that tiny-me would have looooooved. As a child, I’d sit and think about the immeasurable vastness of the universe and wonder what, if anything, was at the edges of it. Chin’s book is all about scale, size, and distance — on our own planet and in the universe as a whole. And he expertly, and beautifully, structures this small book about such a big cosmological subject — no small task, indeed.

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(Click spread to enlarge)

 
With minimal text (the entire book is comprised of two sentences), a consistent aerial perspective, and watercolor and cut-paper collage illustrations in warm yellows and blues, author-illustrator Chris Raschka brings readers a story of friends and family coming together to give thanks. The Blue Table (Greenwillow, October 2020) brings us a small family at the table. Later, another family joins. We see their hands only, as they gather — “thankful … around the blue table.”

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“Over, under, across, through. Around the world, construction crews build overpasses, underpasses, bridges, and tunnels — ways for people to get from one place to another. But what about the animals that live in these places?”

This is the opening of Katy S. Duffield’s splendid Crossings: Extraordinary Structures for Extraordinary Animals (Beach Lane, October 2020), illustrated by Mike Orodán. Readers see creatures of all stripes misplaced by human-made constructions for the purposes of transportation — animals fearfully traversing under giant bridges, freezing in a car’s headlights, hiding from construction equipment, and more. But we also read that around the world, “in search of solutions, animal lovers come together.”

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