Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Dearest Imps, I should probably apologize that two Sundays in a row now I’ve had no art for you (though I DO HAVE KICKS TODAY!). Last week I was down for the count with some sort of cold/flu/heaven-only-knows-what, and this weekend I’m at ALA Midwinter. I’m typing this on Thursday night, as I’m leaving Friday and will be there until the big awards announcements on Monday.

I’ll be moderating a picture book panel discussion on Saturday, which will be fun. I’m also awfully excited that, for the first time, I’ll get to be in the room where the awards are announced. I always watch the live webcast from home every year, so this will be a blast. Best of all, a friend gave me some badges for my family to be able to join me at (some of) the conference, so my daughters, who are big readers, will get to see the exhibit floor (with ALL THE BOOKS SO MANY BOOKS), as well as hear the awards announcements with me.

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Last week, I wrote here about Nikki Grimes’s One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomsbury, January 2017). Here today at 7-Imp, I’ve got a selection of illustrations from the book.

Enjoy!

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I’ve got an interview over at Kirkus today with Ruby Shamir and Matt Faulkner, the author and illustrator of What’s the Big Deal About First Ladies, released this month by Philomel. We talk about leaving the book’s final page empty until the election results came in, what surprising things they learned in their research, and much more.

That is here. I’ll have more art from the book here at 7-Imp next week.

Until tomorrow …

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT FIRST LADIES. Copyright © 2017 by Ruby Shamir. Illustrations © 2017 by Matt Faulkner and reproduced by permission of the publisher, Philomel Books, New York.

That post title was going to be “Some Art That Fell Through the Cracks of the Holidays,” but something about that sounds a bit obscene.

About four weeks ago, I guess it was, I wrote here over at Kirkus about My Children’s Book Ghost File, or a handful of books I wish I had written about last year during their time of publication. Better late than never, right?

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This may be the first Sunday ever in the blog’s history that I don’t have art to show you, but I’m under the weather and being vertical and at a computer is not good. So, I’ve no art (well, I had some planned, promise), and I’ve no kicks. I’m going to go lie down again. Do tell me your kicks. They will be cheery to read.

[As a reminder, 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks is a 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. New kickers are always welcome.]

 
This morning over at Kirkus, I’ve got Nikki Grimes’ excellent new poetry collection. That is here.

Today here at 7-Imp, I’ve got some of Brian Pinkney’s illustrations from Patricia C. McKissack’s Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out! Games, Songs & Stories from an African American Childhood (Schwartz & Wade, January 2016) — as a follow-up to last week’s column.

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As a follow-up to my chat with author-illustrator Greg Pizzoli at Kirkus last week (where I learned what Rubylith is), I’ve got a bit more of his process images from Margaret Wise Brown’s North, South, East, West, coming to shelves this month from Harper.

Enjoy!

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Coming in early February from Jonah Winter and Jeanette Winter is a picture book for young children about the team of people who worked under cover to bring the world the atomic bomb, The Secret Project (Beach Lane Books).

I wonder: Have we seen this topic covered in picture books before? There’s Umberto Eco’s The Bomb and the General, published in 1966 and illustrated by Eugenio Carmi, but that’s fiction and hardly close. There’s Toshi Maruki’s Hiroshima No Pika, published in 1982, but that’s about the bombing itself and the destruction it caused. Right about now is when I wish my fingers had access to the kind of powerful database—that is, the kind I used to have when working in a library—that could do this search for me, a search beyond a Web search, to see what informational picture books may be out there. Still, I imagine any that may exist are geared at slightly older readers—such as books like Clive A. Lawton’s Hiroshima (2004), clearly aimed at middle-schoolers—while the Winters’ collaboration is squarely aimed at kindergarten to third-graders (at least according to the publisher). Read the rest of this entry »

 
Dear Imps, I know it’s 2017 and all that, but let’s look back one more time to 2016 and the publication (in March) of author-illustrator Anne Hunter’s Cricket Song (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It’s a lovely book, and it need not go by unblogged about.

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Last week, I wrote here about Emily Jenkins’s A Greyhound, a Groundhog (Schwartz & Wade, January 2017), illustrated by Chris Appelhans, as well as Steve Light’s Lucky Lazlo (Candlewick, December 2016).

I’m following up with some art from each book today, and Steve also shares some thoughts on Lazlo, as well as some early sketches and such. I thank him for sharing.

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