About a month ago now, we were thrilled to be chosen by Just One More Book for the Butterfly Award. Thank you! And now it’s definitely high time the butterfly winged on its way through cyberspace…

So, we are passing this award on to these great blogs:

All at Create Readers
All of the Blue Rose Girls
Annie at Here and There Japan
Cynthia Leitich Smith at Cynsations
Debbie Reese at American Indians in Children’s Literature
Jen at Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Margriet at Margriet’s Blog
Mitali Perkins at Mitali’s Fire Escape
Uma Krishnaswami at Writing With a Broken Tusk
Zarah Grace C. Gagatiga at School Librarian in Action

(more…)

Sally sent the link to this new video to us all by email – it made me laugh so much, I just had to try and put it onto the blog. I say try because I’ve never uploaded a video before but here goes…

BOOK BY BOOK: the making of a monkey man from Jarrett Krosoczka on Vimeo.

How exciting – hooray, it’s worked!

I love the way video is becoming more and more a way to promote new books: all these wonderfully imaginative authors create some pretty wonderful footage – and this has to be one of the best yet! It’s actually a spoof documentary made by picture-book writer Jarrett Krosoczka. There are lots of other authors/ illustrators in it and they must have had a lot of fun making it – spot the Blue Rose Girls, and the reference to Fuse #8, high in the celebrity stakes!

Jarrett unveiled it last week at the US SCBWI conference in New York, where he gave the opening address. In his blog posting about it he makes this very thought-provoking observation:

I was excited to hear Mr. Gantos speak. I would say I’ve never seen him speak, but that wouldn’t be a complete truth. I saw him speak when I was in the 3rd grade. He visited my school and I remember this clearly – he walked by my desk, pointed to my drawing of Rotten Ralph and said, “nice cat”. That had a profound impact on me.

Cloudscome has already picked it up, and she got it from Miss Rumphius Effect, who challenges us to name everybody before the credits roll…

I’m not sure this is quite the thing for those kids of an age to be reading the book, though – the irony was a bit wasted on my two and they were more inclined to take the whole thing literally… But silly me, of course Jon Sczieska pretends to be an answer phone whenever he doesn’t want to speak to someone!

We at PaperTigers love Grace Lin’s books and highly recommend them. If you’re thinking of buying one as a present (or for yourself!), hop on over to Blue Rose Girls, where Grace is generously offering to send anyone a beautiful, autographed book plate she has designed – you have until December 7th to get in your request…

We will be publishing a full review of Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein with art by Ed Young in our next issue of PaperTigers so I’m not going to say much now – except that it is stunning and enriching, a gentle, heart-warming delight that lends itself to being read aloud in many different ways! It had already been nominated for a Fiction Picture Book Cybils Award by the time I got round to it (as had a couple of others on my list, making decisions much easier… I finally plumped for Colors! ¡Colores!, which I blogged about last week…).

We’ve been waiting for Wabi Sabi to come out for a while – and one of Aline’s and my thrills at the Bologna Book Fair in April was being shown the proofs for the book by Andrew Smith at Little, Brown and Company, where we learnt that we were not looking at the original but at the second version of art-work…

Yes, this book has an amazing, Wabi Sabi-esque story behind it. It’s hard to explain but Alvina, over at Blue Rose Girls, is the book’s editor and has blogged about its amazing story in four installments – read from Number 1 now! In the meantime, here’s what she says about what Wabi Sabi actually means:

Mark spent some time living in Japan, and while there he was introduced to the concept of wabi sabi. He asked many people about it, and they all paused and said, “That’s hard to explain.” but they would offer a poem, or a photograph, a small description, and gradually, Mark began to piece together the meaning of wabi sabi.

So, what is wabi sabi? Well, as I understand it, it is a Japanese philosophical belief in finding beauty in the imperfect, the unexpected, in simplicity and modesty. For example, a old, cracked clay tea cup is wabi sabi, but a fine china cup is not. Fallen leaves in muddy water is wabi sabi. A scruffy, multi-colored cat can be wabi sabi. Mark actually named his cat in Japan Wabi Sabi!

Her final post on the subject came out on Monday and has had me chuckling aloud – but only after I knew the outcome. All’s well, that ends well! Phew – if ever a book has gone through a parallel journey in real life, this is it!