Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

 

It was my pleasure to contribute a piece to the Horn Book’s recent issue (the May/June 2022 issue) celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Newbery Award. I wrote about the Newbery and art, which involved me lugging home, multiple times, a trunk full of award-winning illustrated novels and picture books, all in the name of research. Lovely.

That article is here, or you can click the image above, a screenshot from their site.

“Matin is five. He is from Afghanistan. His waiting place is a field of shipping crates turned into homes, just below a misty mountain where ordinary people picnic and hike. …”
(Click spread to enlarge and read text in its entirety)

 
You’d be hard-pressed to find a children’s book this year as driving, urgent, passionate, and deeply felt as The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found (Candlewick, May 2022), which comes from author Dina Nayeri and photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix. The book chronicles Nayeri’s and Miralpeix’s 2018 visit to Katsikas, a refugee camp near Ioannina, Greece.

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“And wait. And wait.”
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I’ve a review over at the Horn Book of Candace Fleming and Amy Hevron’s The Tide Pool Waits (Neal Porter Books/Holiday House, April 2022), an informative and appealing nonfiction picture book.

That review is here. Today here at 7-Imp are some spreads.

Enjoy!

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In Elaine M. Alexander’s Anglerfish (Candlewick, April 2022), illustrated by Fiona Fogg, readers meet and follow a female anglerfish. We meet her “far, far below the ocean’s surface” as she glides through the water, looking for food. Given that she swims in what is called the midnight zone, a deep black dominates these spreads, the anglerfish’s bioluminescent fishing rod lighting up the waters.

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This morning, Mary Ann Cappiello, Professor of Language and Literacy at Lesley University, and Xenia Hadjioannou, Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Harrisburg campus of Penn State University, sent the letter below to The New York Times, requesting that the paper add three children’s nonfiction bestseller lists to parallel the existing picture book, middle grade, and young adult lists, which focus on fiction.

This change will align the children’s lists with the adult bestseller lists, which separate nonfiction and fiction. It will also acknowledge the incredible vibrancy of children’s nonfiction available today and support the substantial body of research showing that many children prefer nonfiction and still others enjoy fiction and nonfiction equally.

If you support this request, please follow the signature collection form link to add your name and affiliation to the more than 200 educators and librarians who have already endorsed the effort. Your information will be added to the letter, but your email address will remain private.

Here is the letter to The New York Times. … Read the rest of this entry �

 
Last time I checked, there were more than 7.5 billion people on planet Earth. It can be difficult, with such a huge number on such a huge scale, to think about what life is like for others — but not when you do some math and shrink that number to 100 (which has certainly been done before, such as here and here). This is the idea behind If the World Were 100 People: A Visual Guide to Our Global Village (Crown Books), written by Jackie McCann, illustrated by Aaron Cushley, and coming to shelves in July.

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It’s a pleasure to talk to author-illustrator Brian Floca today about Keeping the City Going (Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum, April 2021), what the Horn Book review called a “love letter” to New York City — and to the essential workers that kept cities going during the COVID-19 pandemic. Detailed paintings — in vignettes and expansive, full-bleed spreads — capture New York City last year, a time when it was “strangely still. Yet “[t]here are still some people out on the streets, driving this and that, heading from here to there. They might be family, friends, or strangers. They’re there because we need them. They’re the people keeping the city going.”

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Cynthia Levinson’s newest picture book, The People’s Painter: How Ben Shahn Fought for Justice with Art (Abrams, April 2021), illustrated by Evan Turk, is a force of nature. The book chronicles the life, starting from his childhood in Lithuania, of Shahn (1898-1969), the Jewish artist and activist whose figurative paintings and posters aligned with his social justice causes.

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If, like me, you hadn’t heard of Elizebeth Friedman, author Laurie Wallmark and illustrator Brooke Smart have got you covered in Code Breaker, Spy Hunter: How Elizebeth Friedman Changed the Course of Two World Wars (Abrams, March 2021).

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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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