Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

School Library Journal has used words such as “inspired” and “powerful” to describe this book; Publishers Weekly called it “provocative,” adding that it “makes the invaluable point that history does not have to be remote or abstract, but a personal and ongoing engagement”; and both Kirkus Reviews and September’s Notes from the Horn Book have called it a “sumptuous” volume. What I’m talking about is Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out (published by Candlewick in September 2008), in which over one hundred contemporary writers and artists use everything from stories to poems to essays to personal accounts to presidential letters to speeches to comics to historical records and more to show us, as Gregory Maguire puts it in the opening entry, that “{t}here are as many views, looking in and out of the White House windows, as there are eyes to look.” At almost 250 pages, it was conceived and co-created by the National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance, a not-for-profit literary organization founded in 1997 and composed of award-winning children’s authors and illustrators, and evidently was eight years in the making.

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If you’re a fan of Paul O. Zelinsky’s work, you’re in for a real treat today. Not only did he stop by 7-Imp for breakfast this morning, but he is also over at Just One More Book!! today, chatting with, arguably (or probably not arguably), the hardest working bloggers in the kidlitosphere, Andrea and Mark. Oh for heaven’s sake, do NOT NOT NOT miss that podcast, because Mark and Andrea always bring the goods. Plus some.

And what an honor that he stopped by to chat with us as well. I mean, I’m downright giddy. Over at his website bio, you will read that his first book appeared in 1978 (as well as the fact that, as a sophomore at Yale, he enrolled in a course on the history and practice of the picture book, co-taught by MAURICE SENDAK, whose name I am, yes, yelling, ’cause I find that very exciting), “since which time he has become recognized as one of the most inventive and critically successful artists in the field.” Isn’t that the truth, while also almost sounding like an understatement? How about what Publishers’ Weekly once wrote about him: “Zelinsky is that rare practitioner who can create sophisticated work that adults will marvel at, and that children will joyfully embrace.” Yes, throw in that fan love—adults and children alike—which he has garnered, and…well, you can understand why I’m giddy. He has illustrated or adapted-and-illustrated so many books that we at 7-Imp adore and love and adore some more — as well as lots of other librarians all over the world. Zelinsky has said before, “I’ve…decided that I should be recognized by my unrecognizability.” And some would argue he, indeed, does that well, that his illustrations integrate so well with the text of the book he’s bringing to life with his art, that his versatility is second-to-none. Or, as he once told the Horn Book, he tries to “make the book talk, as it talks to me, and not worry whether it is in my style or not…. I get a kick out of doing each book differently.”

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It’s my turn this month over at Guys Lit Wire. I’m over there today, weighing in on The Mighty 12: Superheroes of Greek Myth by Charles R. Smith, Jr. and illustrated by P. Craig Russell.

The Mighty 12 was released this past Spring by Little, Brown and Company and casts the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology, as you can tell by the cover here, as not unlike the (usually) young, beautiful, scantily-clad superheroes of the comics, ripped bods and all. Over at the post this morning, I’ve got my thoughts on the book, a link to Kelly Fineman’s recent interview with Smith, and a link to the spot on his site in which you can hear him read some of the poems.

If you’re so inclined, here’s the link. So, go read — and discover the wisdom of a “well-placed eagle’s wing.”

Remember how I indicated in 7-Imp’s blog-identity-crisis post that I’ve had less time lately for reviewing books? Well, that’s still the case, but I figured I could touch base with our dear readers and share what it is I’m reading now — or at least have lined up to read. And my focus today is going to be sequels, ’cause Eisha had this great idea a while back to have a 7-Imp Sequel Week. As you can see, sometimes we have great ideas and then it takes a bit of time for life to slow down for us to make them happen. But in the meantime, here are some sequels I’m either reading or have read or am getting excited about reading (and don’t forget Adam Rex’s Frankenstein sequel, which Kelly Fineman and I already covered):

Traction Man Meets Turbodog by Mini Grey (Knopf Books for Young Readers; on shelves in September, I believe) — Traction Man is back! Guess how many starred reviews it’s gotten already? Five — from the The Horn Book, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus, no less. There may even be more stars floating around for it, for all I know. Bottom line is it’s great. Traction Man and his faithful pet Scrubbing Brush are back for more heroic rescues — this time Traction Man must rescue Scrubbing Brush, since the family chucked him after a trip to the northwest slope of Mt. Compost Heap (“it’s just so unhygienic, it must be FULL of germs…”), though it takes Traction Man a while to figure this out while he’s off having adventures with the battery-operated Turbodog. In Grey’s further tributes to the imaginative play of children—not to mention the very real bonds wee ones have with their toys—Traction Man meets up with Handbag Dwellers, the Lone Sock, the Grand Sofa Canyon, the Dark and Terrible Underworld of the Bin and its Evil Creatures and Bin-Things, and much more. How much do I love Mini Grey’s books? Let me count the ways. And she’s supposed to stop by for a seven-questions-over-breakfast interview soon, so we’ll chat with her more then. Read the rest of this entry �

As many of you know, we feature the work of illustrators/artists every Sunday here at 7-Imp, as well as gather together to list what we call our “7 Kicks” of the week. Yesterday, our featured artist was Ursula Vernon, but I moved her feature to today, since I didn’t want our partying down yesterday to distract from her illustrations. Thanks to Ursula for being so flexible and giving me the okay to do that.

As she puts it at her site, Ursula is a freelance illustrator, artist, and creator of weird thingies. “I live in North Carolina, with too many art supplies and a cat,” she adds. Ursula uses a wide variety of media in her artwork, “generally some combination of acrylic ink, fluid acrylic, watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, etc.” – as well as some digital maneuvering. Metal & Magic is the site where Ursula displays her art work. She is the creator of a number of comic projects, including Digger, which was nominated for an Eisner Award. She is also the creator of the short comic Irrational Fears for older children and adults, and the Little Creature stories for teens and adults. Pictured above is a sneak peek — an illustration from Ursula’s Dragonbreath, “which should be forthcoming next summer from Penguin Dial, ” she told me.

The way in which I became familiar with Ursula’s work is through her first children’s book, Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures Of A (Somewhat) Brave Shrew, released this Spring from Harcourt, which Ursula both wrote and illustrated and which I enjoyed. (I’d love to hear from others who have read Nurk, since I don’t recall seeing a lot of blogging about it, though I certainly do my fair share of getting-behind-on-blog-reading, so maybe I missed some posts.)

Nurk tells the story of a mostly-brave shrew, who packs up a few pairs of clean socks and sails off on an accidental adventure, guided by wisdom found in the journal of his famously brave and fierce grandmother, Lady Surka the warrior shrew. In fact, his grandmother’s portrait hangs in Nurk’s front hallway, and “it was the first thing anyone saw when they entered his house. (Since the portrait showed her brandishing a severed head, this was a bit of a shock for first-time visitors, but Nurk’s love for the portrait was undimmed.)”

Check out this bit from Chapter One, which tells us a lot about Nurk and, well, had me at word one: Read the rest of this entry �

Hey, folks. We’ve got a super-spectacular treat (for us) today. We have the extreme pleasure of tri-reviewing with the vivacious TadMack (a.k.a. author Tanita S. Davis) of… well, of lots of blogs, but we’re maybe most fond of Finding Wonderland, one of the other awesome two-girl book blogs we keep tabs on.

The book we’re talking about is Out of the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst’s follow-up to last year’s fun middle-grade modern fantasy, Into the Wild.

If you’ve read Into the Wild, you’ll remember that 12-year-old Julie Marchen, daughter of Rapunzel, lives with a bunch of escaped fairy tale characters and has to help keep guard over The Wild, the enchanted forest that is the source of all our favorite stories. It gets loose anyway, and she barely manages to rein it back in and save the citizens of her town from becoming characters themselves, having to re-enact the fairy tales over and over for eternity. But to do so, she had to leave her mother’s Prince – the father she’s never known – still trapped in his story.

In Out of the Wild, he is, without apparent explanation, freed by The Wild and deposited into Julie’s bedroom. While Rapunzel and the other escaped characters have had 500 years or so to acclimate to the real world and learn to blend in, Prince is still every inch the fairy tale hero. So when some weird stuff starts to go down, involving a kidnapped princess and a rogue fairy turning people into pumpkins, he jumps into action to save the day. But here’s the thing: every time one of the reformed characters does something fairy-tale-ish in this world, they make The Wild grow. So Julie takes off after Prince to try to control the damage his heroics are doing to their ability to keep it contained. Before too long it becomes clear that someone must have set these events in motion in a deliberate attempt to free The Wild, and Julie & Co. have to use every trick at their disposal to figure out how to stop it from taking over the world. Read the rest of this entry �

Good morning, all. Here’s what 7-Imp has to offer today: Three short (for us) co-reviews of some new titles. One is for middle-grade readers; the second for YA readers; and the last one is an actual adult fiction title, making our count for adult fiction reviews a whoppin’ 24 now! Yes, we initially set out to talk about books for all ages at 7-Imp, but we’ve been slacking on our adult titles. Edward Hardy’s Keeper and Kid, our last review here, is one attempt to remedy that.

This wonderful book was released in May, and Eisha and I have been sitting on ARCs for a while. Before we got to our review, it up and won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor in the category of Fiction and Poetry. Savvy, unlike any other book you’ll read this year, tells the story of Mississippi, or “Mibs,” Beaumont. She’s about to turn thirteen, and in her family that’s when the savvy strikes. A savvy, in their world, is “just a know-how of a different sort.” Not knowing what her savvy powers will be—but knowing full well she’s likely in for a huge surprise, since her brother can cause hurricanes, her other brother creates electricity, and her mother is truly perfect—Mibs is just a tad bit anxious about the birthday event. It’s even difficult for her to make friends: “It wasn’t safe to invite anyone over with Fish and Rocket still learning to scumble their savvies; we couldn’t risk someone finding out, or getting hurt by sparks or storms if my brothers lost control.” Yes, that said scumble, which means to learn to use your savvy or work around it; with words like that, you can see that this one’s definitely a read-aloud CHAMP.

To make matters worse, Mibs’s father is in a terrible accident the day before her party, and she now longs to discover she possesses a savvy which will save her father’s life. When she finds out it’s an entirely different and unexpected one, she has to adjust, though in the process she comes to understand a bit about hearing one strong voice in her head—her own—and tuning out others’. And when she stows away on a delivery bus which carries pink Bibles, only to eventually be joined by the preacher’s son and his sister with Quite The Attitude—a bus that heads in the altogether wrong direction—she’s gotta find a way to get to her Poppa.

eisha: This was a fun read. It has that kind of folksy tall-tale language we both dig, with fabulously far-fetched metaphors like… oh, I’ll just open to a page at random… like this: “Momma exhaled a long, slow breath, like she was singing the last note of a lullaby, and my heart almost broke with the total sadness of it.” There’s also frequent use of delicious-on-the-tongue words like “persnickety” and “frou-frou frippery.” Awesome.

I also liked the concept. I love a story that can introduce a bit of the fantastical into an everyday setting, and this one pulls it off nicely. The idea of a family of extra-specially-abled people is irresistibly cool, but the author does a good job of painting a realistic picture of what that would really mean: balancing out the benefits of, say, being able to generate electricity or control the weather with the sort of drawbacks that any kid can relate too: being different from other kids, having to hide who you are to fit in, and having family members who can embarrass the heck out of you in public.

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There are two reasons we’re pleased that author Gail Gauthier has stopped by 7-Imp for a cyber-chat today: First, she’s in the midst of a blog tour for her second early chapter book about Hannah, Brandon, and one monster cat named Buttercup. A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers—the sequel to 2007’s A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat—hits the bookshelves this month and continues the story of Brandon, reluctantly sent to neighbor Hannah’s house for after-school care. Hannah, to put it mildly, has quite the imagination, not to mention a ginormous, over-sized cat. In these new adventures of Hannah and Brandon, Hannah’s neighbors, the Sunderland triplets, try to steal the cat, Brandon and Hannah then setting out to save Buttercup. Just like the first book, A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers is high-energy, packed with adventure, and told with spot-on humor to the elementary students at which it’s aimed, those just becoming interested in chapter books. The books, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, are illustrated by Joe Cepeda; some of the interior art from the new book is included below in this interview.

The second reason we’re happy to host Gail today is that she is a formidable presence in the kidlitosphere corner of Blogistan and has been since 2002. We are chatting with her today as not only an author but also as a blogger — one I’ve wanted to interview for a long while now. (And, no, we haven’t forgotten our blogger interviews. It just so happens that the last three people we’ve asked to interview are terribly multi-faceted and in-demand and . . . well, busy. We’ve stalled on that interview series for a bit out of necessity. But we’re patient. And I digress.)

Where was I? Over at Gail’s blog, Original Content, Gail talks a little bit about Everything Kidlit — her writing, trends, other books, publishing, blogging, etc. And what I love in particular is that she tells it like it is and isn’t afraid to pose questions — whether she’s talking about her thoughts on award-winning books, authors blogging, celebrity authors, or why blog reviews are important.

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We’re speaking in code today, prompted by Alec Flint, Super Sleuth.

Anyone remember this recent post I (Jules, that is) wrote? It’s all about what I called EarlyEmergingBegin-
ningInterChapterMe-
diateReaders, books that fall somewhere between picture books for children and what are often called middle-grade novels. Well, things are comin’ up very EarlyEmergingBeginningInterChapterMediateReaders this week at 7-Imp — at least at the beginning of this week. Today, we’re hosting a book give-away* (which is the translation of our super-sleuth code up there), and tomorrow we’re going to chat with Gail Gauthier, author of two early chapter books herself.

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You’d think we’d be pretty blasé about this kind of thing by now. I mean, we’ve been lucky enough to have interviewed a lot of cool, brilliant, amazing people over the past two years. You’d think we’d be all: “Ho hum, here’s yet another person with more talent in his little pinky finger than we’ll ever hope to have in our entire bodies. *Yawn.* Whatever.”

But no. It’s always a thrill when someone we admire is willing to cyber-hang with us. And we’re pretty much gobsmacked over this one.

Today, we’re talking with David Small. Yes, the David Small. We are just a teensy bit in love with him. But then, who isn’t? Eisha can date her crush to the first time she read Imogene’s Antlers, wa-a-a-ay back in her early children’s librarian days. That spread where Imogene is wearing doughnuts on her antlers to feed the birds pretty much knocked her flat. And it only got better with each successive book: David’s ability to convey everything you need to know about a character and exactly what he/she is thinking and feeling at a given moment is uncanny. Take a look at the gentle social satire evoked by Miss McGillicuddy’s long-suffering expressions in The Money Tree; the surreal hilarity of those bovine troublemakers in George Washington’s Cows; the irresistible charm of The Gardener; the painfully familiar heroine of The Library; the quietly luminous The Journey; the… okay, can’t-even-think-about-this-one-without-crying perfection of The Mouse and His Child; and the sweet, subtle grace of The Friend. Just, you know, to name a few faves.

David has been making picture books since 1981. As the biography at his site states, David’s books have been translated into several languages, made into animated films and musicals, and have won many prestigious illustration awards, including the 1998 Caldecott Honor for The Gardener written by his wife, Sarah Stewart, and the 2001 Caldecott Medal for So, You Want To Be President? by Judith St. George. “To date he has illustrated over 40 picture books,” the biography closes. “At an average of 40 pages per book, that makes around 1,840 illustrations, though someone ought to check that math.”

David has also done extensive work for national magazines and newspapers; his drawings appeared regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Some examples of his editorial illustrations can be viewed here at his site. Pictured here is our Commander-in-Chief.

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