The Rules of ‘The Dark’

Lemony Snicket—aka Daniel Handler—saw a drawing by Jon Klassen that showed the dark talking. "As soon as I saw that, the entire book came to me," Handler said. In The Dark by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Jon Klassen, the dark talks to a boy named Laszlo. No wonder the boy is afraid of the dark. But their relationship evolves over the course of the book. "For a moment, it looked like The Dark was going to be Jon Klassen's first book," recalls Handler, "and then it looked like it was going to be his lifetime achievement award ...

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Ashley Bryan's Desire to Help

Ashley Bryan believes that "the desire of a child, when they see someone in need, is to help." Perhaps it's his own desire to help others that keeps Ashley Bryan such a youthful and involved human being—or should we say "human doing"—at age 89. Who Built the Stable? A Nativity Poem began during Bryan's annual trip to work with children in Africa. The boy hero, a carpenter and shepherd, offers shelter in a stable he's built to a couple who seeks a place to stay after others have turned them away. 

How did the idea ...

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Olivier Tallec: Breaking Down Walls

Olivier Tallec, a Frenchman, named the protagonists of his wordless picture book, Waterloo & Trafalgar, for two failed Napoleonic battles. He painted one in blue and the other in orange so they’d be “immediately identifiable and unmistakable.” To hear Tallec tell it, his story was inspired by the walls that come between people, and the walls between countries.

In this electoral season, find peace in picture books.

We loved that you could see blue in the lens of orange Trafalgar’s telescope, and orange in the lens of blue Waterloo’s telescope. Even the flowers near Trafalgar are orange, and ...

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Patrick McDonnell: His Monster Marches to a Different Drummer

In his first picture book since his Caldecott Honor homage to Jane Goodall, Me…Jane, author-artist Patrick McDonnell invents The Monsters’ Monster, starring a trio of “little terrors,” a group of tiny monsters who aspire to invent a monster to beat all. But when they unveil Monster, a towering, green-complected, Frankenstein-looking fellow, he’s not fearsome; he’s…grateful!

Here, McDonnell discusses how his work on the MUTTS comics has informed his picture books, and the inspiration for his latest creation.

See our full 2012 Halloween picture-book round-up.

Did it feel a bit like going from the sublime to the ...

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A Three-Way Collaboration: Bruce Coville, Elizabeth Levy & Paula Danziger

“It’s OK that you love each other,” Paula Danziger, who died in 2004, used to tell her best friends Elizabeth Levy and Bruce Coville. “You just can’t love each other more than you love me.”

What she loved most was being with both of them together, Levy says. Now Coville and Levy are continuing the story of Danziger's character, Amber Brown, in Amber Brown is Tickled Pink—with the blessing of Carrie Danziger, the inspiration for her Aunt Paula’s character, whom the co-authors have known since she was a preteen. Levy and Coville say it’s ...

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BEA: The Fantastic Fortuitous Detours of Mr. Morris Lessmore

William Joyce and his team at Moonbot Studios won an Oscar for their short animated film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. But “it started as a book, it was always a book,” says Joyce.

Read more children's books at BEA.

The character of Mr. Morris Lessmore was inspired by a real man, William Morris, “a most unlikely revolutionary who changed how books found their way into children’s hands,” as Joyce writes in the book’s jacket copy. Here he discusses the fantastic fortuitous detours of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and how that book-loving gent led the ...

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

When Claudia Rueda began her version of the story about a trio of pigs that build their houses of straw, wood and brick, and guard against a wolf, she wanted youngest readers to participate.

In her book, she invites readers to Huff & Puff, and the pigs surprise the wolf with their courage and hospitality. Here Rueda speaks of her inspiration.

Find more retellings of “The Three Little Pigs."

What made you decide to retell The Three Little Pigs?

I wanted to tell a story where a kid could blow through a hole. I thought, “What’s a story with huffing ...

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Gregory Rogers: Wordless and Limitless Possibilities

With The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard and its follow-up, Midsummer Knight, Gregory Rogers demonstrated the limitless possibilities to be explored for a boy who follows his passion and curiosity. The same could be said of the man who created them.

Here Rogers discusses his third book starring that same boy, The Hero of Little Street, and the endless possibilities of stories told wordlessly. In it, the boy finds himself in London's National Gallery, where he first plays with a dog that has jumped out of a painting and then joins the dog jumping into another one ...

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Shane Evans: The Ongoing Journey to Freedom

In 2011, Shane W. Evans wrote Underground, a book with minimal text and powerful images about the Underground Railroad, focusing in large part on one family’s journey. January 2012 marked the release of his book We March, which traces one family’s preparations and path on the March for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.

When we caught up with Evans, he was in Uganda, teaching art classes to orphans.

Find more picture books that celebrate friends and family among our Best of 2012.

If we look at the covers of Underground and We March side by side ...

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Kadir Nelson: History From the Ground Up

For this sweeping project, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, Kadir Nelson marries his monumental paintings to a cozy storyteller’s voice. He says he crafted the narrator’s voice based on his grandmother and from his friend Debbie Allen, whose soft Texas drawl greets you in conversation along with “honey” and “chile.”

Nelson’s narrator invites us to pull up a chair and hear about her experiences and those of her family, beginning with slavery throughout the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Civil Rights Movement, up to the 2008 election that would result in the first ...

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Love and Greenpoint in 'Brooklyn Burning'

Steve Brezenoff now lives in the Twin Cities of Minnesota with his wife, Beth, and 3-year-old son, Sam. But his heart belongs to Brooklyn. It’s the place where he cemented his relationship with Beth, and from the first chapters of Brooklyn Burning, it’s clear how intimately he knows its Greenpoint neighborhood.

Although Brezenoff has not written a song in more than 15 years, he plays the guitar and the trumpet and did a few turns with some Brooklyn bands. Maybe that’s why Kid, Scout and Felix—his three teen protagonists—seem to breathe and pulse to the ...

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Louise Rennison on the Humor of Growing Up

Ever since her Georgia Nicolson books, beginning with Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison has aligned herself with girls in the throes of the confounding experience of adolescence.

Georgia and now her cousin, Tallulah Casey, the narrator of Withering Tights, allow young women to laugh at themselves and their travails, as they worry about the size of their “corkers,” or breasts, and when they’ll ever get to snog (kiss). The author says, “I luuurve it when the girls write to me and tell me the horrific things” they go through. Here she reveals what inspired many of the ...

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Shaun Tan: Finding Meaning in Ambiguity

Lost and Found contains three books that Australian author, artist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Shaun Tan originally published separately: The Red Tree, The Lost Thing (both written by Tan) and The Rabbits, with text by John Marsden.

Read more about graphic novels this week during Comic-Con San Diego with our Graphic Novels Roundup.

Because he worked on the books around the same time (1998-2001), Tan says, “They are invested with a lot of my preoccupations as a young author and illustrator.” He explained their connection as “something to do with the relationship between power and ignorance, inspiration and apathy, light and ...

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Walter Dean Myers: A Country of Inclusion

What is America? What does it mean to be an American? And what is the responsibility that comes with pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America? Walter Dean Myers explores these questions and more in his book We Are America, illustrated by his son, Christopher Myers.

Like the Myers’ previous collaboration Harlem, this picture book demonstrates that America is more than a place, it is a state of being, constantly changing, but with a history that shapes the future of its people.

Find more great poetry & verse among our 2011 Best Books for Children.

How did ...

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Cookie-Craving as the Mother of Invention

What’s a boy and his pal to do when carrots won’t satisfy the hunger pangs and the cookie jar is out of reach? Why, invent a gargantuan robot helper, of course—CookieBot! Author Katie Van Camp freely admits that she takes her inspiration for this and her first title about the indomitable duo (Harry and Horsie) from her years as an au pair to a boy named Harry with a best friend named Horsie.

Find more great picture books to ignite the imagination among our 2011 Best Books for Children.

Here she discusses not only the seeds of ...

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Beauty, not so skin-deep

When told that she may have missed her calling as a stand-up comic, Libba Bray said, without skipping a beat, “I’d have to be a sit-down comic. I want the comedy to come to me.” And that’s just what happened with Beauty Queens. The idea came to her from Scholastic editor David Levithan, who told Bray, "Planeload of beauty queens crash on an island.’ I think you should write that book.”

Find more great books that are good for a laugh among our 2011 Best Books for Teens.

“Oh my God! I would kill to write that book ...

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Kate Messner: Can a Love of Mud and Theater Mix?

As a writer, Kate Messner draws from her life—and she has a full one. The mother of two, a full-time classroom teacher and a writer, the author’s schedule demands that she move fluidly from one role to the next. Here, Messner discusses the origins and themes of Marty McGuire, illustrated by Brian Floca.

Want more chapter-book heroines?

What were the seeds of the idea for a third-grade tomboy playing a princess in a class production of The Frog Prince?

The book grew out of two things. I’d just finished writing two regional historical novels having to do ...

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Traditional Songs for Today's Kids

Nina Crews hit a winning combination with her book The Neighborhood Mother Goose (a 2004 Kirkus Editors’ Choice). She took classic rhymes and created modern urban scenery from her Brooklyn neighborhood, peopling it with the children who live there. Why not do the same for favorite childhood songs? Here Crews discusses the seeds for her newest book, The Neighborhood Sing-Along, and the key to conveying the joie de vivre in her photos of children at play.

Read more reviews of books about children's songs at Kirkus. 

What prompted you to do a book of childhood songs?

For awhile after ...

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Sarah Emma Edmonds, Adventurous Youth

Carrie Jones may be best known as the author of the novels Need and Captivate, but she claims that her picture-book biography, Sarah Emma Edmonds Was a Great Pretender: The True Story of a Civil War Spy, illustrated by Mark Oldroyd, is “kind of a coming home.” She started out as a newspaper reporter and editor, so fact-collecting and fact-checking is second nature to her—which turns out to be helpful when you’re researching a woman disguised as a Union Army soldier in the late 1800s.

Get to know other great overlooked women in history you've likely never ...

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Phil Bildner and the Boys of ’41

He may not be in front of a classroom on a daily basis anymore (he taught most recently at P.S. 333, a junior high in Manhattan), but Phil Bildner still loves to teach. With his picture books about baseball and its legendary players, he may well have attracted a whole new generation of sports fans.

Take a look at Kirkus' 2011 Baseball Books Round-up for kids.

Kirkus talked with him about his latest picture book, The Unforgettable Season: The Story of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and the Record-Setting Summer of ’41, illustrated by S.D. Schindler, why he believes ...

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