King of the Sky By Nicola Davies Illustrated by Laura Carlin

A powerful and beautifully illustrated story about migration and the meaning of home, from the award-winning team behind The Promise.

A breathtaking new picture book by children's author Nicola Davies, illustrated by Laura Carlin, winner of the Bratislava Illustration Biennale and the Bologna Ragazzi Prize for Illustration. Starting a new life in a new country, a young boy feels lost and alone – until he meets an old man who keeps racing pigeons. Together they pin their hopes on a race across Europe and the special bird they believe can win it: King of the Sky. Nicola Davies’ beautiful story – an immigrant’s tale with a powerful resonance in our troubled times – is illustrated by an artist who makes the world anew with every picture. A musical adaptation of King of the Sky has already met with success on the stage, shown two years running at the Hay Festival and due to tour Welsh theatres next spring.

 In this tale of a young boy, an old man, and a dauntless pigeon, a lyrical text and extraordinary illustrations offer a gorgeous meditation on loneliness, belonging, and home.
A young Italian boy has moved to the Welsh hills with his family. He feels isolated and unhappy, a stranger in a strange land. It is only when he makes an unlikely friend, an old man who lets him fly one of his pigeons in a race, that he learns how he can belong. Nicola Davies's beautiful story -- an immigrant's tale with powerful resonance in our troubled times -- is illustrated by an artist who makes the world anew with every picture

 In a story full of hope against adversity, King of the Sky tells how flying a homing pigeon helps a young boy comes to terms with his life in a strange country far, far from home. Now living under grey skies in a country where he feels an outsider, a young boy misses the blue sky, warm sun and of ice cream of his home in Rome. But when he his racing pigeon returns to him safely from Rome the boy realises that home is where he is and he finds a new sense of belonging. ~ Julia Eccleshare

The Tree by Neal Layton

A delightful picture book with a wonderful twist which encourages young children to think about the way animals and humans live side by side.

The tree. Home to a family of birds in their nest, squirrels in their drey and rabbits in their burrow. But what happens to the animals when a man and woman decide to cut it down and use it for their dream house? Can the tree be home to both the animals and the humans? A simple yet fun and distinctive picture book, with a strong environmental message about the importance of respecting animal habitats, by the award-winning Neal Layton.

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

  
When a family wants to cut down a tree to build a house, what happens to the animals nests and burrows? Can a tree be home to everyone?
 
For the rabbits, birds, and squirrels, the big tree is home. But then come two new arrivals with wonderful plans, all ready to create their dream house. What will it mean for the animal families if their tree is cut down? With empathy and imagination, Neal Layton offers a hopeful outlook in this simple and powerful fable about the harmony of the natural world."

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

Praise.

 

If Neal Layton were a bird, he’d be part of that genus that includes John Burningham and Quentin Blake, because it is with similar delight and abandon that he warbles and flits about his own branches.

—The New York Times.A feather-light tribute to finding common ground—or make that common air space.

—Kirkus Review

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action. - See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.

- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

The importance of inference in reading a picture book is superbly demonstrated here. The written text is minimal. It begins with a lone tree and then drills down to the names of animal homes within it, while the pictures portray their occupants. Then come some new arrivals – what changes might they bring and will they be for good or ill? There’s a wonderful wordless central moment when the protagonists realise what they have done and before they are galvanised into affirmative action.
A lovely book to read and talk about in the early years. As children’s knowledge about describing language expands, considering the brevity of the text, this book affords many interesting opportunities for highlighting the use of adjectives, verbs, punctuation and alliteration.
- See more at: https://www.clpe.org.uk/tree-neal-layton#sthash.CZdc03Q0.dpuf

Some Writer, The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet

“SOME PIG,” Charlotte the spider’s praise for Wilbur, is just one fondly remembered snippet from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. In Some Writer!, the two-time Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet mixes White’s personal letters, photos, and family ephemera with her own exquisite artwork to tell his story, from his birth in 1899 to his death in 1985. Budding young writers will be fascinated and inspired by the journalist, New Yorker contributor, and children’s book author who loved words his whole life. This authorized tribute is the first fully illustrated biography of E. B. White and includes an afterword by Martha White, E. B. White's granddaughter. 

 

 

 

 

 

On why the typewriter is the thematic design for the book

When I was researching E.B. White, the manual typewriter came up all the time. He used it as a child, all through his life. ... If there was one object that I thought represented E.B. White, it was the manual typewriter. So as a collage artist I wanted to use the pieces of a typewriter — the keys, the font and — in fact I typed up all of his quotes on a manual typewriter.

On what she learned about White's creative process

I was curious from the start about how he wrote his children's books. And each one surprised me; that Stuart Little came to him in a dream, one he had on a train. He woke up and wrote it all down. That was the beginning of Stuart Little. ...

 

 

 

On her own process and how she distilled White's story into an illustrated biography

The trick was that there was so much information, so the fun is that we find ways to make it consistent throughout. So, all the archival pieces are on — for instance — a light green paper.

Hopefully the reader goes along and doesn't notice the design so much, but just that the book flows. The design of it makes it like a jigsaw puzzle and, to be honest, I think it's the most fun part.

Once you know what you want to say and you have all this material fitting it together, finding the right pieces is really fun. It's akin to making one collage. It's the same — you're pushing pieces around until you hit on, you don't want to touch it — you've nailed it.

 

 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

 

“On how one orients himself to the moment,” Henry Miller wrote in reflecting on the art of living, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Indeed, this act of orienting ourselves — to the moment, to the world, to our own selves — is perhaps the most elusive art of all, and our attempts to master it often leave us fumbling, frustrated, discombobulated. And yet therein lies our greatest capacity for growth and self-transcendence.

Rebecca Solnit, whose mind and writing are among the most consistently enchanting of our time, explores this tender tango with the unknown in her altogether sublime collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost (public library).

Solnit writes in the opening essay:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

Illustration from ‘Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost.’ Click image for details.

The inquiry itself carries undertones of acknowledging the self illusion, or at the very least brushing up against the question of how we know who “we” are if we’re perpetually changing. But for Solnit, as for Rilke, that uncertainty is not an obstacle to living but a wellspring of life — of creative life, most of all. Bridging the essence of art with the notion that not-knowing is what drives science, she sees in the act of embracing the unknown a gateway to self-transcendence:

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

But unlike the dark sea, which obscures the depths of what is, of what could be seen in the present moment, the unknown spills into the unforeseen. Solnit turns to Edgar Allan Poe, who argued that “in matters of philosophical discovery … it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely,” and considers the deliberate juxtaposition of the rational, methodical act of calculation with the ineffable, intangible nature of the unforeseen:

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

The poet John Keats captured this paradoxical operation elegantly in his notion of “negative capability,” which Solnit draws on before turning to another literary luminary, Walter Benjamin, who memorably considered the difference between not finding your way and losing yourself — something he called “the art of straying.” Solnit writes:

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

T and O map by Bartholomaeus Angelicus, 1392, from Umberto Eco’s ‘The Book of Legendary Lands.’ Click image for details.

Even the word itself endured an unforeseen transformation, its original meaning itself lost amidst our present cult of productivity and perilous goal-orientedness:

The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

Taking back the meaning of lost seems almost a political act, a matter of existential agency that we ought to reclaim in order to feel at home in ourselves. Solnit writes:

There’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.

[…]

Lost [is] mostly a state of mind, and this applies as much to all the metaphysical and metaphorical states of being lost as to blundering around in the backcountry.

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.

Illustration for ‘Mapping Manhattan.’ Click image for details.

During a recent vacation, I went horseback riding on a California ranch, home to a tight-knit equine community. Midway along the route, my horse glimpsed his peer across the field, carrying another rider on a different route, and began neighing restlessly upon the fleeting sight. Our guide explained that the horses, despite being extraordinarily intelligent beings, had a hard time making sense of seeing their friends appear out of nowhere, then disappear into the distance. Falling out of sight held the terror of being forever lost. My horse was calling out, making sure his friend was still there — that neither was lost. Underneath the geographic disorientation, one can imagine, lies a primal fear of losing control.

Despite the evolutionary distance, this equine disposition bears a disorienting similarity to the duality of our own relationship to the concept of lost — losing something we care about, losing ourselves, losing control — which Solnit captures beautifully:

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a sublime read in its entirety. Complement it with Where You Are, an exploration of cartography as wayfinding for the soul, then revisit Anaïs Nin on how inviting the unknown helps us live more richly.

The Doldrums by Nicholas Gannon

Archer B. Helmsley has grown up in a house full of oddities and treasures collected by his grandparents, the famous explorers. He knows every nook and cranny. He knows them all too well. After all, ever since his grandparents went missing on an iceberg, his mother barely lets him leave the house.

Archer longs for adventure. Grand adventures, with parachutes and exotic sunsets and interesting characters. But how can he have an adventure when he can’t leave his house?

It helps that he has friends like Adélaïde L. Belmont, who must have had many adventures to end up with a wooden leg. (Perhaps from a run-in with a crocodile. Perhaps not.) And Oliver Glub. Oliver will worry about all the details (so that Archer doesn’t have to).

And so Archer, Adélaïde, and Oliver make a plan. A plan to get out of the house, out of their town entirely. It’s a good plan.

Well, it’s not bad, anyway.

But nothing goes quite as they expect.

“A dreamy charmer of a book, full of clever wordplay that practically demands it be read out loud.”—New York Times
Have you ever wanted to hold a little piece of the impossible? Lavishly illustrated in full color, The Doldrums is an extraordinary debut about friendship, imagination, and the yearning for adventure from author-artist Nicholas Gannon. A modern classic in the making, The Doldrums is for readers of inventive and timeless authors such as Brian Selznick and Lemony Snicket.
Archer B. Helmsley wants an adventure. No, he needs an adventure. His grandparents were famous explorers . . . until they got stuck on an iceberg. Now Archer’s mother barely lets him out of the house. As if that would stop a true Helmsley. Archer enlists Adelaide—the girl who, according to rumor, lost her leg to a crocodile—and Oliver—the boy next door—to help him rescue his grandparents. The Doldrums whisks us off on an adventure full of sly humor, incredible detail, and enormous heart.

With approximately twenty pieces of breathtaking full-color artwork, as well as black-and-white spot illustrations, and gorgeous, literary writing, Nicholas Gannon proves himself to be a distinctive new voice with his middle grade debut. Be in it for the limitless imagination. For the characters who capture your heart. For the rich world you’ll want to settle into. But most of all, be in it for the friendship. That, after all, is the true adventure.