Updated: Dec 26, 2024
Thrilled 🎉 to be celebrating World Ocean Day (Saturday 6/8/24) at one of my favorite places -- The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA -- with a noon reading and launch of our NEW picture book biography, Else B. in the Sea - The Woman who Painted the Wonders of the Deep! (Abrams/Cameron Kids). Gorgeous ocean illustrations by Melodie Stacey.
If you're in the area, I hope you'll stop by and say hello AND see the pups that have been rescued and are being rehabilitated for their release back to the ocean.
Admission to the Center is free - just reserve a spot online at The Marine Mammal Center.
Book reading PLUS a free drawing of a signed book AND handouts of fun craft activities to take home!
The children's book features the pioneering artist, Else Bostelmann, who painted never – before – seen bioluminescent creatures described by scientist, William Beebe, on his 1930s bathysphere expeditions off the coast of Bermuda for the department of tropical research (now the The Wildlife Conservation Society.
Else even painted underwater to understand the effect of different depths of ocean water on the appearance of color.
I was inspired to write the true stories of ASTRO THE STELLER SEA LION and HONEY GIRL THE HAWAIIAN MONK SEAL by the amazing work done at The Marine Mammal Center.
- May 22, 2024
A True Tale with
A CHERRY ON TOP
Peachtree
(pub. 6.11.2024)
32 pages
Ages 4 - 8
Author: Kerry Aradhya
Illustrator: Kara Kramer
Character: Ernő Rubik
Overview:
"A solitary child, Ernő Rubik grew up in post-World War II Hungary obsessed with puzzles, art, nature, and the underlying patterns and structures. He became a professor of art, architecture, and design, who was still fascinated with how objects work together, sometimes becoming greater than their components.
In a quest to help his students understand three-dimensional objects and how they move—not to mention a desire to entertain himself—he fashioned a cube whose pieces twisted and turned without breaking, and unexpectedly invented the Rubik's Cube, the most popular puzzle in history, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2024."
Tantalizing taste:
"Ernő was curious about the objects around him.
What did they look like on the inside?
Drawing them helped him understand the world.
He was also curious about geometric shapes.
How many ways could he fit them together?
Tangrams, pentominoes, and pentacubes
helped him imagine all the possibilities.
Ernő thought the three-dimensional
objects he created out of his little cubes
were beautiful."
And something more: The author, Kerry Aradhya, kindly shared with me a wonderful inside scoop about the book: "Ernő Rubik's parents were a great inspiration to him, especially his father, who was an aviation engineer. If you look closely, you will see a yellow toy plane hanging from the ceiling of Ernő's room in a few spreads from the book. I love that Kara Kramer incorporated that little detail into the art!" Me too! It's just the type of secret that I find students love to hear when I do school visits.
As a parent of two sons who LOVED to race each other to solve the Rubik's Cube, I was fascinated to learn about the creation of the cube. The section at the back of the book, The Magic Cube, explains: "If you think Ernő Rubik knew how to solve the puzzle he'd invented, you'd be wrong. That's because he never intended to invent a puzzle at all! It was only after twisting and turning the three-dimensional object, and losing track of its original position, that he became curious about how to restore order to the chaos he'd created ... It took him about a month to find a solution, and he did it using a combination of intuition and logic."
Ernö Rubik and his Magic Cube is a delightful celebration of creativity, intuition and logic!
- Apr 22, 2024
Updated: May 7, 2024
Gene Stratton-Porter Shares Her Love
of Nature with the World
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Calkins Creek
(Astra Books for Young Readers)
(pub. 3.12.2024)
48 pages
Ages 7 - 10
Author: Jill Esbaum
Illustrator: Rebecca Gibbon
Character: Gene Stratton-Porter
Overview for review of BIRD GIRL:
" Gene Stratton-Porter was a farm girl who fell in love with birds, from the chickens whose eggs she collected to the hawks that preyed on them.
When she grew up, Gene wanted nothing more than to share her love of birds with the world. She wrote stories about birds, but when a magazine wanted to publish them next to awkward photos of stuffed birds, she knew she had to take matters into her own hands.
Teaching herself photography, Gene began to take photos of birds in the wild. Her knowledge of birds and how to approach them allowed her to get so close you could count the feathers of the birds in her photos. Her work was unlike anything Americans had ever seen before—she captured the true lives of animals in their natural habitat.
A pioneering wildlife photographer and one of the most popular authors of the early 20th century, this bird girl showed the world the beauty of nature and why it was worth preserving."
Tantalizing taste:
"Geneva takes on the care of sixty-four nests. She visits each one every day, inching forward softly, silently, watching and wondering.
If a bird so much as twitches a wing, she freezes ... and waits for it to relax.
The birds, wary at first, are soon chirping hellos and flitting onto Geneva's head and shoulders, tiny claws tickle poking, as she pulls treats from her apron pocket.
Happy birds, happy bird girl."
And something more: Jill Esbaum, in the Author's Note writes: "All of Gene's books... included plenty of what she sometimes called 'nature stuff.' That nature stuff is what kept readers coming back... They often added that her books had sparked in them a commitment to protect wild places. That was Gene's proudest accomplishment. She knew what happened when nature's wild places were lost. She'd seen it outside her own back door. By 1910, there wasn't much left of her beloved Limberlost Swamp...
So imagine how she would feel to learn that two Indiana conservation groups, inspired by her life and books, began in the 1990s to buy up chunks of farmland and woodsy patches that were once part of the 13,000-acre Limberlost Swamp. Their goal? To bring it back. As of this book's publication, nearly 1,800 acres have been restored."
