There are authors whose new books you want to buy as soon as they are published. For me, Natasha Pulley is one, yet I waited on The Mars House. Hard science fiction is not really a genre I follow, and this one was billed as a queer romance set on Mars. Yes, but it has woolly mammoths! and a goofy dog! and a principal male ballet dancer for the central character! This past week, I finally read a library copy—and bought my own at a local bookstore. Definitely on the reread list.
Picturing a World
Tree and River
July 1, 2024
Congratulations to Aaron Becker! His wordless picture book, The Tree and the River, is the 2024 double winner of England's prestigious Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration (awarded by an expert panel of librarians) and the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers Choice Medal for Illustration, which is decided by children and library users. It's one of those picture books in which the more you look, the more you see. In double-page spread after double-page spread, it depicts the colonization of a beautiful valley, its gradual transformation to village to town to city to ruin to—well, you'll have to get hold of the book to find out!
Summer Half
June 20, 2024
I've just finished rereading one of my all-time favorite bedtime comfort reads: Summer Half by Angela Thirkell. My copy has this cover; and as soon as I picked it up, I could identify all the characters, even the gent with the moustache, Colin Keith. I visualize him differently (authors know readers do that), but it pleases me that Claire Minter-Kemp has obviously read the novel, for she depicts him as he appears in Thirkell's description. Not much point to this post except to say here's hoping the second half of summer 2024 supplies us all with some light moments. Happy Summer Solstice!
Alan Lee's Green Dragon Inn
September 22, 2023
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.
Jennings' illustration process
July 17, 2023
Blog post alert: Kathleen Jennings, one of my favorite working illustrators, has a terrific post on Art process — designing "the Fairest" for Owen King's The Curator. You can see her progression from first sketches, through the development of concepts, and examples of her use of silhouettes. Owen King is new to me. Thanks to Jennings, I'm giving him a try. As for the jacket design, that belongs to Jaya Miceli—give more of her work a look-see here.
Yuta Onoda cover
July 3, 2023
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!
Tyger
January 27, 2023
My latest reading from the books I gave myself at Christmas is the new YA fantasy, Tyger by S. F. Said. It is set at Midwinter in the harsh London of an alternative universe, where Muslims must live in a Ghetto and aristocrats own slaves. It is anti-colonial, for sure, and demonstrates the harm done by in prejudice and injustice. Yet unlike R. F. Kuang's Babel (see previous post), it is full of love, courage, and loyalty.
Black-and-white
January 9, 2023
Babel by R. F. Kuang is another of my presents-to-myself. I've only read a few pages; but so far, it's a yes, even though reviews (like this one) make clear that the story is very dark. Well, black-and-white art is obviously appropriate for a noirish novel; and what I want to call attention to today is the jacket illustration by Nico Delort, shown here in two versions.
Maggie O'Farrell for young readers
January 6, 2023
My copy of The Boy Who Lost His Spark by Maggie O'Farrell arrived today from Blackwell's (an excellent non-Amazon source of books from Britain). It has illustrations by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini on nearly every page, the sort of thing I have loved since childhood. Looks like a good bedtime story now that the holidays are over—and, yes, I do have a stack of presents-to-myself books to carry me through January. Happy reading, one and all!
Amber Spyglass illustrations
December 19, 2022
I'm miffed with the USPS. For my Christmas present to myself, I ordered the new illustrated edition of The Amber Spyglass from Blackwell's in England in mid November to go with my copy of Northern Lights. It arrived in York, PA, two days later, then got stuck in Washington D.C., where it has been "delayed" for nearly a month—and the USPS website says it is not eligible for further inquiry until December 3rd! Well, at least Catching up with Chris Wormell on the release of The Amber Spyglass gives a glimpse of some of the illustrations.