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Mornings With Monet: My BookPage Q&A
with Barb Rosenstock and Mary GrandPré

h1 February 25th, 2021 by jules


“It is magic.”
(Click spread to enlarge)

“Once I began focusing on Monet, I kept writing drafts that started in his childhood, which is a typical way to connect a young reader to historical biography. I soon realized that Monet’s childhood would bore children, because it was boring me! When I asked myself what I thought a young reader would find interesting, the answer was the boat.
Why would you paint on a boat? How do you paint on a boat?
What happens when you paint on a boat?”
— Barb Rosenstock

Over at BookPage, I’ve a Q&A with author Barb Rosenstock and illustrator Mary GrandPré about their newest collaboration, Mornings with Monet (Knopf, March 2021). It’s a nonfiction picture book, as Barb notes in our Q&A, that begins and ends in four hours and captures Claude Monet one morning (3:30 AM, no less) “on his way to work.” And “work” is painting, from his rowboat (his “studio boat”), on the Seine. It’s a beautifully crafted book, filled with vivid sensory language and richly imagined acrylic illustrations.

Here’s the Q&A, and below is another spread from the book.



 


“He wakes to shadows the color of steeped tea, swings his sturdy legs from bed, buttons his pants, shrugs up suspenders, streches a shirt over his broad belly, laces thick feet into tough boots, and grabs a battered felt hat on the way downstairs. This man,
Claude Monet, is rich, famous around the world. He’s on his way to work.
It’s 3:30 in the morning.”
(Click spread to enlarge)


 


(Click cover to enlarge)


 

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MORNINGS WITH MONET. Text copyright © 2021 by Barb Rosenstock. Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Mary GrandPré and reproduced by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.





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