Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

 
In her newest picture book, the lovingly designed My Friend Earth (Chronicle, February 2020), author Patricia MacLachlan personifies Earth as a girl, just waking from a winter nap. And illustrator Francesca Sanna makes her a brown girl — she is a loving girl who sees everything in nature. She also guides creatures to safety; she tends the earth and its animals; she guards creatures in the ocean; she pours the rain, blows and stills autumn winds, and — once winter returns — “sprinkles the snow.” The story comes full circle when she lies down again in winter for a nap.

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“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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It’s the first Sunday of a new month. The days may be running together, but I’m pretty darn sure it’s the first Sunday in April. A first-Sunday means I feature the work of an illustration student or newly-graduated one. Today, I welcome Avani Dwivedi, who graduated, as she tells you below, from MICA last spring. She’s here to tell us a bit about herself, as well as share some of her richly colored, vibrant illustrations. (Pictured above is part of an illustration from her thesis project, which she discusses below.) Let’s get right to it, and I thank her for sharing today.

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As I was reading this book for about the fifth time the other day, knowing that I wanted to write about it, I started making notes about what I was seeing. They ended up being joyous exclamations, like: “The textures! The colors! The DETAILS!”

Yes, you get all of this — and more — in Raúl the Third’s ¡VAMOS! Let’s Go Eat (Versify, March 2020), colored by Elaine Bay. This is the follow-up to last year’s ¡Vamos! Let’s Go to the Market. We revisit Little Lobo and his dog Bernabé in this bilingual adventure; this time they discover on page one that they are needed at el Coliseo right away. Lucha Libre 5000 will be taking place there that night, and we all know from the first book that Little Lobo loves wrestling — and wrestling star El Toro, who appears in this new book as well.

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