Katherine Keenum

Here at the end of summer, perhaps one last run to the beach? For sure, a joyous book for us childless DOG ladies—Doug Salati's Hot Dog! I borrowed it from the library, read it, and went out to buy my own copy (from a local independent bookstore, naturally).  I've walked dogs in the city; taken them on country outings; known their stubborn moments, their devotion, and their joy. Salati's 2023 Caldecott award-winning book lets me relive vicariously the sweetness of life with a dog. That's one of the pleasures of children's picture books: they let you experience moments of delight over and over and over.

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

 Read More 

Hoo boy! How's this for a follow-up to yesterday's post? A transformation of every major element of Hollar's Pedlar into something lively, colorful, and strange. Lion-dog: otter. Skeleton: dragon. Peddler: traveller. Pannier: mystery box. It's Alan Lee's illustration for a story in Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson. I have just requested the book through interlibrary loan to find out what's going on. (As an author, I encourage people to buy books. As a library trustee and environmentalist, I urge you to remember what marvellous resources the country's public libraries provide.) As for this picture, I guess I'll wait to see what Dickinson was up to, but wouldn't it be fun to make up a story of one's own to go with it?

I have just reread Polly Redford's wonderful, quirky novel, The Christmas Bower. It is classified by libraries as children's literature, but the protagonist, Noah, is the only child in the book. Can anyone think of another children's book in which most of the characters are adult?

Serendipity + disparate connections = story possibility. Recently, my husband and I took a drive along a rural back road. In the side yard of a pretty 19th C farmhouse, a black bear was asleep. When we stopped, it roused and ambled away. On our return down the same road later, there it was again. When I e-mailed a niece about it, she replied, "The Napping Bear—it could be a pub or home goods store or anything." I thought of Barbara Firth's illustration for Martin Waddell's Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? and bingo! a children's bookstore. Now to figure out what happens there.

A few years ago, I borrowed a library copy of The Hobbit illustrated by Alan Lee. On the back of the jacket was an illustration of Bilbo joining the dwarves in front of the Green Dragon pub which was not included inside. Oh, well, I decided to spring for a second-hand copy just for the pictures and ordered on line what I thought was the right edition. When it arrived, lo and behold, its jacket was different. No Green Dragon. Phooey. To my amusement, when I searched for the illustration this summer, it turned up at a website with exactly my story of disappointment about the Green Dragon jacket illustration. That set me thinking about the difference between fan fiction and fan illustration.

 Read More 

Blog post alerts: Two recent posts set me thinking about the exercises and games creative people use to hone their skills or explore their art. The first is The Wiggle Game, which illustrates a parlor game played by painters in Old Lyme, Connecticut: One would draw a set of random squiggles for the others to expand into pictures. The second is Tropes to Taste, which explores an exercise for altering worn-out devices and descriptions in fiction. Personally, I have never carried out such mechanical exercises in any sustained way, but I love reading about them. And I love Stillwater and Koo on the endpapers of Jon J. Muth's Zen Ties!

Ottilia Adelborg (1855–1936) is another of the Scandinavian female artists who was an almost exact contemporary of the real (and the fictional!) Jeanette. She studied at the Swedish Royal Academy at the same time Jeanette was in Paris and may have studied in France later herself. She became a children's book writer and illustrator. The English-language edition of her Clean Peter is available online.
 
She also illustrated other writer's books, such as The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson by Selma Lagerlöf, for which this watercolor is a preliminary design. I haven't read the Lagerlöf book (which is available in a new translation), but this picture of a daydreaming boy and a tiny figure climbing out of the chest could suggest a story just by itself, don't you think? Or prompt a poem about the nature of imagination?
 

At bedtime, I'm rereading Kelly Barnhill's excellent middle-school novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. This time, what struck me when I took the book off the shelf was the cover art by Yuta Onoda. Flat, poster-style art works well for making a jacket visible across a room, and Japanese manga-anime styles can thus be very effective. But just look at the volume and motion achieved in billowing skirt of the girl's cloak! And the depth and contrast created by the fiery band below the shadowy city under that huge moon with the swirling origami birds. This isn't cartoon work.
 
I explored Onoda's website and was led by it to my next YA choice, How Do You Live?—which is even better when you open out the book and find that the jacket is wraparound. Maybe you can't judge a book by  its cover—but, as the publishing industry knows, it sometimes helps!

As we near Midsummer, I have pulled out Shaun Tan's Rules of Summer and read it two or three times in the past week. At each reading, I've laughed out loud. It's brilliant! It's zany! It's surreal! It's wise. For me, it's one of the indispensable books.

 Read More