Over the years, I’ve shared many of the books I love on Picture Book Builders. There was A Hungry Lion: A Dwindling Assortment of Animals, written and illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins. I love that it’s subversive, funny, and unexpected. There was Mimi and Bear in the Snow, written and …
I found two picture books that I really like. And the funny thing is, they are both wordless and both use a limited color palette. First up is SPOT, THE CAT, by Henry Cole. This book has utterly delightful, very detailed, black and white line illustrations with all the charm and …
Hello again, it’s Barb Rosenstock. PBB asked me to return to fill-in for Pat Zietlow Miller for a few months. I decided to develop a series of posts on picture book editors by interviewing the style-makers and award-winners—the folks who run their own imprints. I hope you learn as much …
Ahhh, October. My favorite month, wrapped in the cozy blankie of my favorite season. Crisp air, blue skies, fire-shaded leaves, harvest, apple pies. Lots to love. One new thing I love is – surprise – a picture book, one I discovered in a Wisconsin bookstore while between presentations this past …
I am a huge Oliver Jeffers fan, so when a trusted employee at my indie book store brought me a new book by him and told me that everybody at the store loved it, I said, “I’m not even going to read it first, I’m buying it!” And I did. …
Been to the movies lately? Then maybe, like me, you’ve seen the trailer for Loving, a soon-to-be-released film about Mildred and Richard Loving, the Virginia couple jailed for their interracial marriage in 1958. The preview shows several disturbing scenes and menacing encounters, including a chilling middle-of-the-night arrest. Watching the trailer prompted …
When I was little, my grandparents had a version of RUMPELSTILTSKIN that I adored. The story was strange, scary, and had these awesome ink drawings. At the time, I didn’t understand the concept that books were made by individual artists, so I never paid attention to who might have made them. They …
Last spring I got a sneak peek of a book that bowled me over, Candy Fleming and Eric Rohmann’s Giant Squid. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before. Take a look at this opening page. That glimpse of tentacles waving in a vast full spread of undersea darkness? Gives me the shivers. The …
In 2015, illustrator Goro Fujita and I were responsible for an alien invasion. Your Alien begins when a little alien crash-lands on a boy’s front yard. The two have a great day together, but, when nighttime arrives, the boy notices something is wrong with his alien. At last, the boy …
I picked up “The Blue Whale” by Jenni Desmond because I was curious to read the story behind this beautiful and intriguing cover. And the book does begin as a story with “Once upon a time, a child took a book from a shelf and started to read.” This …