Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: Eisha, holy guacamole! One of our favorite children’s book creators is here today, Jarrett J. Krosoczka. And it’s for such a very fun reason. He is going to tell us the story behind how he came to write his new graphic novel series, debuting this summer from Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, called Lunch Lady.

In Book 1, Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute (to be published at the end of this month), we find out that Lunch Lady, bedecked in her yellow suction-cupped rubber gloves, fights crime — but secretly so. The Breakfast Bunch at Thompson Brook School—Hector, Dee, and Terrence—do wonder what she does when she’s not a lunch lady and dishing out shepherd’s pie (“I bet she has a like a hundred cats!” Dee says). But little do they know she’s got the backs of the students, meeting up with Betty (her sidekick and herself a lunch lady) in the Boiler Room, to keep an eye on the school and any, ahem, robot substitutes who might be planning very evil plots. Well, little do they know until they decide to follow her one afternoon; Hector, after all, does wonder aloud one day if perhaps she’s “some sort of super secret-agent spy or something.”

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Jules: Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

And it happens to be the first Sunday of the month, in which I like to shine the spotlight on someone new to illustration.

But, first: Happy Independence Day and happy holidays to our American readers. We hope you enjoyed some good fireworks and red, white, and blue pie. (Oh yes, I did. I took in a slice of Cool Whip, strawberry, and blueberry pie. Mmm.) And we hope some folks will be around to kick with us today, even though it’s a long, leisurely holiday weekend for a lot of us.

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This week, I’m re-reading Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, a National Book Award finalist, published back in 1997. Lynch is an essayist and poet, but he also—as the first chapter’s opening line tells us—buries a couple hundred of his townspeople every year. Yes, he’s the funeral director for the small Michigan town in which he lives — or at least he was back in ’97.

It’s a moving, life-affirming collection of essays, despite how it all might sound. As I started re-reading the book the other day, my eye was drawn to an excerpt from Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” which Lynch uses to open the book. Then, I looked up the poem in its entirety, and I was blown away. Beautiful.

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I’m shining a spotlight today on someone who is not new to children’s lit but who has just released the first title he’s both written and illustrated. And that would be Jason Chin. You may have read about Redwoods (Flashpoint, March 2009) in Betsy Bird’s early-June review (“you have kids that think non-fiction is dull as dishwater? Meet the cure”); in the Horn Book (“the book is…a contagious celebration of the relationship between information and imagination, the pure joy of learning”); in Booklist (“the first book Chin has written as well as illustrated is a real eye-opener”); in Kirkus (“an inventive, eye-opening adventure”); in School Library Journal (“this remarkable picture book delivers a mix of fantasy and fiction through beautifully detailed watercolors”); or Publisher’s Weekly (“Playing with the notion of just how immersive a book can be, illustrator Chin…makes his authorial debut with a clever exploration of coast redwoods”). Most of those are starred reviews, I might add. I hope, however, that you have actually read it — and not just read about it. And that’s because it’s every bit as good as the reviewers say.

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Anyone else seen Salvatore Rubbino’s A Walk in New York and wanna share in my enthusiasm for this book? You know what I love most about this one, all about a young boy’s first visit to Manhattan with his father? The cheer in the book practically drips from the pages: The young boy, in all his excitement to see the big city, exudes a joy that is infectious. “I can tell who the visitors are,” he says in this first-person narrative: “{W}e’re the ones who keep stopping to look up!”

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Jules: Happy Sunday to all, and welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #121, featuring illustrator Tony Persiani and author Chris Barton, who has—in the past—joined us for some kickin’ here on a few Sundays (Chris, that is). It’s a pleasure today to have both Tony and Chris here to say a few words and show us some art from their new title, The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors, to be released by Charlesbridge in July. The Day-Glo Brothers, which is both the author’s and illustrator’s picture book debut, tells the story of Joe and Bob Switzer, who were born at the turn of the last century, who were opposites in many ways, and who—“by accident”—invented totally new fluorescent colors: Fire Orange and other glowing reds, yellows, greens, and more, which they came to call “Day-Glo” colors.

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Funny thing happened this week: I (along with MANY other people, including everyone I work with) was informed that, due to one person’s negligence and another person’s wickedness, our sensitive personal data has been released into the ether. Like, the kind of data you steal someone’s identity with. On our employer’s covering-their-asses advice, I immediately placed one of those fraud alert thingys on my credit info and checked out my credit report. So far, so good. But it’s still very scary; and as I keep hearing from other people, if anything does happen with my credit, the damage could be permanent. Evil-data-thieves may get to change identities like they’re changing underwear, but as a law-abiding citizen I’m apparently stuck with mine for life.

This is certainly the most concrete reason I’ve had for wishing that weren’t true, but it’s not the first time I’ve wanted to be able to start all over and wake up in a different life. Wouldn’t it be great to be an unknown quantity, a blank slate? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to escape from myself for a while, to fly under everyone’s radar — including my own — and be really truly free?

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I’m in one of my let’s-shine-the-spotlight-on-a-new-author/illustrator moods today, so I invited newcomer Johanna Wright over. I’m taken with her debut picture book, The Secret Circus (Roaring Brook Press, March 2009). You know how when you were a kid and the notion of miniature, underground, secret worlds was just about the coolest thing ever? Yes? Or was it just me?

Well, The Secret Circus is all about a world so shh-shh-secret that only the mice can find it. And it’s in sparkly Paris, no less, so it’s even better. A tiny circus. With tiny acrobats. Mice acrobats. Who tame big ol’ cats. In fact, that’s the spread opening this post, “the scariest page in The Secret Circus,” Johanna told me. “The mouse audience looks quite worried.”

Here they are eating their giant popcorn, which Johanna says she’d also like to do:

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This is author/illustrator Jan Thomas with her Public Relations Officer and Security Chief. She’s here with her canine staff today to chat over breakfast with what I’ll call the Jan Thomas Appreciation Society. And that would be Yours Truly and two of the country’s best children’s librarians (all hyperbole—which regular readers know I’m guilty of—aside), Adrienne Furness of What Adrienne Thinks About That and Betsy Bird over at A Fuse #8 Production. Adrienne has written posts like “My Profound Love of Books by Jan Thomas”; Betsy has written reviews like this in which she’s declared things like, “All right. That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. Could we please please PLEASE just get it over with and declare Jan Thomas some kind of national treasure / picture book genius?” and “Thomas has that rare gift for synthesizing a book down to its most essential parts”; and I’ve posted about Jan’s work a bit as well—having turned into such a big fan of her titles, thanks to Adrienne—but the 7-Imp Jan-Thomas sightings are hardly tantamount to my fan-dom. So, I decided I wanted to shine the spotlight on her, too. And when I—lucky me—snagged her for an interview, I asked Adrienne and Betsy if they’d like to contribute some questions and/or say a bit about their own ardent devotion to Jan’s books.

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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

And Happy Father’s Day to all our papa-readers out there!

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