Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“Then Ella put the two heart halves on the ground. She laid them close together so they made a whole heart. …’Rest in peace, dear hearts!'”

 
Today at Kirkus, on account of a summer slump, I’ve got Seven Impossibly Good Bits of Book News. That is here.

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Last week, I wrote here about lazy summer (re)reading and mentioned Rose Lagercrantz’s See You When I See You (Gecko Press), illustrated by Eva Eriksson and coming to U.S. shelves in August of this year. It’s a wonderful addition to this wonderful series. Today here at 7-Imp, I’ve got some illustrations from that.

Enjoy!

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“Who invented the hot shower? I owe most of my first lines to that brilliant person. I can research and write and think and suffer, and then one morning—if lucky—the shower gods deliver a sentence. It is that sentence that allows me to stop researching endlessly and begin to write ….”

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Over at Kirkus today, I talk to author Leda Schubert, pictured here, about her new picture book biography of Pete Seeger, Listen: How Pete Seeger Got America Singing (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, June 2017), illustrated by Raúl Colón.

That Q&A is here.

Until tomorrow …

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Leda’s photo taken by Bear Pond Books.

 

(Click to enlarge)

 
I’ve got a review over at BookPage of Antoinette Portis’s new picture book, Now (Neal Porter Books/Roaring Brook, July 2017). That is here.

And right here at 7-Imp are some spreads from the book.

Enjoy!

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It’s the first Sunday of the month, and that means that here at 7-Imp I showcase the work of a student or debut illustrator. Today, I’ve got the artwork of Sophie Page, a mixed media and 3D illustrator and a recent RISD grad. Sophie is based in Brooklyn.

Sophie talks a bit about her work below, and I thank her for visiting and sharing today. Let’s get to it. (Pictured above is If Only He Stayed a Bear Forever, one of her personal pieces and her take on the fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red.”)

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“When Miss Moon showed the villagers her tree, they said, ‘Oh well, of course—those are the old man’s paper flowers on a stick. You can’t grow a tree from a bead!'”
— From Jacqueline Ayer’s The Paper-Flower Tree: A Tale from Thailand
(Click to enlarge spread)

 

— From Lizi Boyd’s I Wrote You a Note
(Click to enlarge)

 
This week over at Kirkus, I’ve got lazy summer (re)reading on the mind.

That is here.

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Last week, I wrote here about Jacqueline Ayer’s The Paper-Flower Tree: A Tale from Thailand (Enchanted Lion, June 2017) and Lizi Boyd’s I Wrote You a Note (Chronicle, June 2017).

I’m following up with some art today.

Enjoy!

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“Life is not always easy.”
(Click to enlarge spread)

 
I’ve got a review over at BookPage of Cynthia Rylant’s Life (Beach Lane Books, June 2017), illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Brendan Wenzel.

The review is here, and I’ve got some spreads from the book here at 7-Imp today.

Enjoy!

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I saw this image, created by author-illustrator Julia Denos, on Instagram this week, and I secured her permission to share it here. I like it. It makes me think of not sweating the small stuff in life. You can click on it to see the entire image in her sketchbook.

When I asked her about it, she wrote:

I’ve been really moved lately by exploring space and local nature. There is so much to learn. Finding stories in the nonfiction of stars and flowers and trees.

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“Oh, here is Zarrar: he is ready to start the paint work, he says. …”
— From Anjum Rana’s This Truck has Got to be Special,
illustrated by Hakeem Nawaz and Amer Khan
with illustration design by Sameer Kulavoor
(Click to enlarge spread)

 


“You are a boat! With your squirmy corridors that twist inside, your levers and pulleys that flex your strong muscles, and your furnace-heart that pushes you forward, tearing the sea in two. And look—rooms upon rooms in your belly! So how does it feel to be a boat? How does it feel to hold everyone in your belly-rooms?”
— From James Kwan’s How It Feels to Be a Boat
(Click to enlarge spread)

 


— From Stephen Savage’s Little Plane Learns to Write
(Click to enlarge spread)

 

Today over at Kirkus, I’ve got building bridges on the mind.

That is here.

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Last week, I wrote here about James Kwan’s How It Feels to Be a Boat (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, July 2017); Stephen Savage’s Little Plane Learns to Write (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, June 2017); and Anjum Rana’s This Truck has Got to be Special, illustrated by Hakeem Nawaz and Amer Khan (Tara, July 2017) — with illustration design by Sameer Kulavoor.

I’m following up with art today.

Enjoy.
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“It is frustrating to see how a willful ignorance is becoming almost a badge of honor for certain people. You see a lot of dismissive statements that are contrary to how science works. So, I think teaching kids that scientists work as a community of fact-checkers who never stop questioning and challenging our assumptions about the world is probably more relevant than ever.”

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Over at Kirkus today, I talk to author/illustrator Dave Roman about his work as the series editor for First Second’s Science Comics series of nonfiction graphic novels. I wanted to know, in particular, what it’s like to offer these science titles in a day and age of science-denial, which is what he addresses in the quote above.

The entire Q&A is here.

Until tomorrow …

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Dave’s self-portrait above used by permission of First Second.

“… He plunged his knife into its flesh,
but the snake turned out to be very much still alive ….”

 
Over at BookPage, I talk to author-illustrator Greg Pizzoli about his newest picture book, The Quest for Z: The True Story of Explorer Percy Fawcett and a Lost City in the Amazon (Viking, June 2017). It’s a book that is, as I note in my review, a complex and intriguing look at a man for whom European imperialism was unsuccessful — certainly a topic rarely addressed in most K-12 curricula. That Q&A is here, and my review of the book is here.

Today here at 7-Imp, I’ve got some spreads from the book.

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