Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

One of Henkes’s house sketches in watercolor and colored pencil

 
It was my pleasure to review for the Horn Book the latest picture book from Kevin Henkes. It’s called A House (Greenwillow, September 2021), and that review is here.

Here at 7-Imp today, Henkes shares some early sketches, as well as a few images that served as inspiration for this book. I thank him for sharing.

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Please forgive me for skipping picture-book art today, but I’m taking a moment to share, here at 7-Imp, that we have kicked things off over at the Horn Book’s Calling Caldecott, a place to visit for anyone out there who enjoys geeking out over picture books and illustration.

Our kick-off post, which is here, was this past week. And to keep following along — we have some very talented guest posters lined up to write about some spectacular books — Calling Caldecott is here, always there, in cyberspace.

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“‘Ama and Poobah,’ shouts Ada. ‘The fog’s gone. I can see the stars!
Wow! Come look. Come look.'”
(Click spread to enlarge)

 
I’ve got a chat over at Tennessee’s Chapter 16 with author and physicist Alan Lightman and illustrator Susanna Chapman. Lightman wrote, along with Olga Pastuchiv, Ada and the Galaxies (September 2021), illustrated by Susanna. It’s the first children’s book in the inaugural list from MIT Kids Press, an imprint formed in 2020 between the university and Candlewick Press.

That Q&A is here.

And here at 7-Imp, I have a few spreads — and an illustration study (some shells from Susanna). As you will read in the Q&A, the illustrations for this book incorporate images of the Milky Way taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Enjoy!

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“Can I disappear with you? …”
(Click spread to enlarge and read text in its entirety)

 
Sour Cakes (Owlkids, October 2021), written by Karen Krossing (her picture book debut) and illustrated by Anna Kwan, is an ode to sibling relationships and how, in particular, a sibling can lift you up when you are in the stormiest, heaviest of moods.

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“Time to play, Little Bird, time to spin across the sky.”

 
Little Bird’s Day, arriving in October (Blue Dot Kids Press), comes from author Sally Morgan and illustrator Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr. It’s the story of a day in the life of Little Bird — from the “rising and shining” of the Sun to the arrival of Moon, “glowing and whispering.” Both author and illustrator are Indigenous Australians: Sally belongs to the Palyku people from the eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia. Johnny is a Yolŋu artist from the Ganalbingu clan in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia, and his paintings depict both Ganalbingu songlines and his mother’s Wägilak clan stories.

This is Johnny’s picture book debut; as the winner of the Kestin Indigenous Illustrator Award in 2017, he was asked to illustrated Sally’s manuscript, and this book — originally published in Australia in 2019 — was born. Read the rest of this entry »

“In Abuela’s midnight kitchen, white tiles feel cool under my feet. Aunts and cousins and neighbors talk over each other above my head. I crunch tostones and scoop arroz and slurp flan and fall asleep at the table, my mom still laughing,
saying loud Spanish words that I don’t understand.”
(Click spread to enlarge)

 
You don’t have to wait too much longer now (it will release in early September) to see Elizabeth Lilly’s Let Me Fix You a Plate: A Tale of Two Kitchens (Neal Porter Books). This bighearted tale is one of my favorite 2021 picture books. And how about that title?

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Shane Goth’s The Midnight Club (Owlkids, October 2021) captures the thrills of children sneaking around a house at night when the adults are sleeping — a time when, somehow, the house they live in appears different, even magical. This is Shane’s first picture book (he also notes in the book’s jacket bio that he founded the Midnight Club at age four), and it was illustrated by Yong Ling Kang, who grew up in Singapore and now makes her home in Toronto.

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Mary Lee Donovan’s A Hundred Thousand Welcomes (Greenwillow), illustrated by Lian Cho and coming to shelves in October, is like honeysuckle to a bee for young language-lovers — and also a very welcome read (excuse the bad pun) for those moments when the goings-on in the world get you down.

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“Once upon a time, although this happens all the time, a tiny star fell to earth.”

This is the opening line of Mem Fox’s The Tiny Star (Knopf), illustrated by Freya Blackwood and originally published in Australia in 2019. It will on shelves here in the U.S. in October. A star falls to earth and, we learn at the page-turn, “turned into a baby!” As you can see, Fox is utterly matter-of-fact about this, the notion that stars regularly land on our planet and turn into humans — so matter-of-fact and plainspoken that it’s remarkably easy to accept, as unexpected as it may be to read.

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“My leaves gave people shade. My branches gave birds a place to rest.
And each year, I was one of the first trees to blossom.
My flowers let everyone know that spring was coming.”
(Click spread to enlarge)

 
Sean Rubin’s This Very Tree (Henry Holt, May 2021), another 2021 picture book offering that marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, is based on, as Sean explains below, research around trauma and its treatment. Dr. Lucy Guarnera (Sean’s wife) taught him, as he notes in the book’s acknowledgments, what it would look like for the survivor tree — the Callery pear tree planted near the Towers in the 1970s, which survived the Towers’ falls — to “experience its trauma and recovery as a human would.”

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