Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

 

It was very fun to talk for Tennessee’s Chapter 16 to comedy writer Carsen Smith about the new sci-fi series she co-wrote with James S. Murray — Area 51 Interns.

Our chat is here.

“Spring arrived. The snow melted. …”
(Click spread to enlarge and read text in its entirety)

 
This past week, the Horn Book posted “Picture books for National Poetry Month 2022” at their site. It’s a great round-up, and in that list is a book I reviewed for them — the playful Moving Words About a Flower (Charlesbridge, March 2022), written by K.C. Hayes and illustrated by Barbara Chotiner. If you’d like to read about it, that review is here (along with some other wonderful picture books). Here today at 7-Imp are some spreads.

Enjoy!

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I’ve a review over at BookPage of Chester van Chime Who Forgot How to Rhyme (Little, Brown, April 2022), written by Avery Monsen and illustrated by Abby Hanlon. Teachers and librarians, meet your next Best Read-Aloud.

The review is here, and below are some spreads.

Enjoy!

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Illustration on the dedication page of Where Butterflies Fill the Sky
(Click image to enlarge)

 
Zahra Marwan is a fine artist who, this month, sees the publication of her debut children’s book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: A Story of Immigration, Family, and Finding Home (Bloomsbury, March 2022). The book captures her family’s story of immigration from Kuwait, in which they were considered stateless, to New Mexico. The art in this deeply felt story is filled with motifs that represent her memories of home — and the city in the U.S. that she and her family made home. (In fact, a closing note about the art provides even more details about what readers see.)

Today at 7-Imp, Zahra contributes a photo essay about her immigration experience. Below that are some spreads from the book. I thank her for sharing.

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“We keep our fire safe in a playpen / where we feed it,
mostly leftovers from the woods …”
(Click illustration to read the poem, “Fireplace,” in its entirety)

 
Dear Imps, pull up your cyber-chairs (and bring your best coffee and favorite breakfast dishes) to read about this poetry collection from award-winning poets Ted Kooser (former U.S. Poet Laureate) and Connie Wanek. They joined forces for Marshmallow Clouds: Two Poets at Play among Figures of Speech (Candlewick, March 2022), illustrated by Richard Jones, and the results are immensely satisfying. “The poems in this book,” Kooser writes, “are about fooling around, about letting one’s imagination run free with whatever it comes upon.” Adds Wanek: “[I]t’s fun to listen for voices from unexpected places.”

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I love to see the work of author-illustrator Marie-Louise Gay. At BookPage, I have a review of I’m Not Sydney! (Groundwood, February 2022). That is here.

Also, did you all see the winners of the 2022 Ezra Jack Keats Awards? Paul Harbridge has won the Writer Award, and Gracey Zhang has won the Illustrator Award. You can read more about the awards here as well as take a peek at the Honor books.

 

Now’s a fitting time to point readers back to this 7-Imp post, “‘Rondo Concerns Everyone’: A Guest Post by Oksana Lushchevska.” Back in 2015 at 7-Imp, Oksana Lushchevska — a doctoral student (at that time) in Reading, Writing, Children’s Literature, and Digital Literacy, who was born in Ukraine — reached out to me to see if she could write at 7-Imp about Ukrainian picture books. She contributed several posts, and one of those was about this book, The War That Changed Rondo, which Enchanted Lion Books released in English last fall as How War Changed Rondo (which Oksana translated). In her post about Rondo, Oksana wrote about the book and talked to the creators, Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, who shared a story with Oksana about how “Rondo concerns everyone.”

School Library Journal also shared this post this week at The Classroom Bookshelf.

As I’ve said at every social media platform I use (in order to get her attention), I’m having trouble reaching Oksana to check in on her. I hope she and her familiy are safe.

(Click spread to enlarge)

 
The endpapers of It’s So Difficult (Eerdmans, March 2022) — written and illustrated by Raúl Nieto Guridi (also known as Guridi), originally released in Spain in 2020, and translated by Lawrence Schimel — depict a ledger filled with rows and rows of numbers. And that’s because the story’s protagonist, a child, finds it relaxing to count things or calculate numbers. And those attempts at relaxation are necessary, because …

When I leave the house, everything is difficult for me. I feel a prickling that won’t go away, and every step I take is a triumph.

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“WE WILL demand that everything we buy has a label that details its impact on Nature, People, and Planet. That way, we can choose to buy products
that help Nature, not hurt it.”
(Click image, illustrated by Musa Omusi, to enlarge)

 
Dear Imps, I’m typing this on Thursday, because my Friday and my weekend will be largely consumed with the 14th IBBY Regional 2022 conference in Nashville. IBBY is the Interational Board on Books for Young People, and I’m looking forward to the (masked and vaxxed!) gathering of people coming to this conference. (You can read more about it here.) I’m also looking forward to moderating Saturday’s panel discussion about international children’s books, a conversation with Angus Killick of Red Comet Press; Christopher Lloyd of What on Earth Books; John Mackey of the Publishing Task Force of the Italian Trade Agency; and Emma Radditz of Elsewhere Editions.

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“It wasn’t her father,
who was always bringing home surprises from the outside world.”
(Click image to enlarge and see spread in its entirety)

 
I’ve a review over at the Horn Book of Matthew Forsythe’s Mina (Paula Wiseman Books, February 2022).

That is here, and below are some of the book’s glorious spreads.

Enjoy!

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