Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

 
If you are familiar with the book Saturday, written and illustrated by Oge Mora, you’ll recognize the characters in this image above. It’s Ava and her mother, the unforgettable duo of the story. Oge posted this image on Instagram recently, and she wrote: “Um…look what rockstar librarian @lizzeppelinii made!! Bout passed out when I saw it. SO COOL.” The librarian’s name is Liz Braithwaite, and she’s a children’s librarian in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She also sewed Pokko! I’m in love.

I’m sharing this, because on May 27 the winners of the 2020 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced, and Saturday won in the Picture Book category. I always look forward every summer to the announcement of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners, but I’m feeling especially celebratory this year, because I had the pleasure of chairing this year’s awards with fellow judges Sujei Lugo and Leo Landry. Last Sunday, I had wanted to do a bit of celebrating of the winners, but I posted something else instead. But here’s some celebrating at 7-Imp today — a short something about each book. Come October, they will all be celebrated at the Horn Book’s (online) awards ceremony. Details on that later. Read the rest of this entry �

 

I had the pleasure of chairing the 2020 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards with fellow judges Sujei Lugo and Leo Landry. The awards were announced yesterday. The books we fell in love with are pictured here, but you can head here to the Horn Book for more details.

 
Today, author-illustrator Lisa Brown visits to share some process images from the creation of her newest book, a graphic novel called The Phanton Twin (First Second, March 2020). It’s the story of conjoined twins — the Peabody Sisters, Isabel and Jane — raised, since the age of three, in a carnival sideshow.

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This Saturday, April 18, at 2 p.m. CST / 3 p.m. EST, two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry will do a live-streamed event via Crowdcast with Brookline Booksmith, an indie bookstore in the Boston area. I will chat with her a bit about her work, including her new novel in verse, and there will be a Q&A as well. Won’t you join us?

Here’s the info.

“A blinding light came. A roar. A vibration. / And after that, silence.”
(Click image to see poem, “Takeo,” in its entirety)

 
Over at Tennessee’s Chapter 16 today, they have a double feature for fans of Lois Lowry — a review I wrote of her new novel, On the Horizon: World War II Reflections (Houghton Mifflin, April 2020), illustrated by Kenard Pak. And they also have a transcription of a phone chat she and I had, during which Lowry talks about writing this book and lots more.

The interview is here. The review is here.

And here today at 7-Imp are a few illustrations from the book.

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“What do things look like? Really? I often think about that.”
(Click spread to enlarge)

 
I’ve a few spreads today from an illustrated novel, originally published in Swedish in 2017. Sara Lundberg’s The Bird in Me Flies will be on shelves in May from Groundwood books and has been translated by B. J. Epstein. This lyrical, deeply felt story (which received Sweden’s August Prize, as well as the Snöbollen award) was inspired by the paintings, letters, and diaries of Swedish artist Berta Hansson, who was born in 1910 and died in 1994.

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I read just this morning about a well-reviewed book about sex, aimed at children and written by a sex educator, causing all kinds of controversy at a Massachusetts school. To be clear, I haven’t read that particular book, but generally speaking these kinds of stories bum me out. Children deserve, for many reasons, straight-up talk about their changing bodies, sex, and gender identity, and at least here in the South, I find that many adults would just like to pretend students don’t have curiosity about these things all. (What passes for sex education here is pretty dismal.)

That’s one reason I was happy to read Tell Me: What Children Really Want to Know about Bodies, Sex and Emotions (Gecko), a German import (originally published in 2014 and translated by Shelley Tanaka) now on shelves here in the U.S. It is written by Katharina von der Gathen and illustrated by Anke Kuhl. And it is a breath of fresh air. Read the rest of this entry �

Today I’ve got some spreads from one of my very favorite 2019 books — Ashley Bryan’s Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, October 2019). This is a 112-page picture book memoir that chronicles the award-winning author-illustrator’s (often harrowing) experiences in the segregated army of World War II (he was drafted in 1943 while an art student at Cooper Union) and, essentially, how his love of art got him through. This is the first time Bryan writes publicly of his war experiences and shares them with the wider world.

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Over at the Horn Book’s Calling Caldecott this morning, guest poster and librarian extraordinaire Alec Chunn writes about two graphic novels that I myself have read and liked this year. (In fact, he was the one who suggested I read the one pictured above-left.) The two books are Mai K. Nguyen’s Pilu of the Woods (Oni Press, April 2019) and Jen Wang’s Stargazing (First Second, September 2019).

I really like what he has to say about the two books, so I’m sending you in the direction of his post today. That is here.

 
As I’ve made clear before here at 7-Imp, I’m a fan of Abby Hanlon’s Dory Fantasmagory books. I think Abby taps into something real (and often quite poignant) with these books; in the hands of a lesser author, Dory’s antics would be altogether cloying. But Abby seems to know how to write about childhood in a way I think is authentic. She depicts children as they are — in all their glorious weirdness, that is — and not in ways that an adult thinks they should be. (We see a lot of the latter in children’s books.) It’s hard to get books for this age right, and I think Abby gets it just right.

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