At the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s annual trade show, held this year from October 2–4 at the Holiday Inn @PDX in Portland, Ore., Friday evening’s celebratory dinner was all about the kids. Or at least, all about books for them. The meal’s theme was Dinner at the Kids’ Table and it featured five prominent authors and illustrators who presented their latest works to a rapt audience.
Matthew Holm, who, along with his sister, Jennifer, is the creator of the graphic novel series Babymouse and Squish, introduced his new graphic novel, Sunny Side Up. Holm showed an entertaining slideshow of him and his sister growing up in the 1970s in a house with five kids – “why doesn’t anyone ever talk about all the plaid pants people wore?” – and how books played a vital role in his childhood. He and Jennifer created Babymouse so that girls could have a sassy girl superhero to look up to, since he remembered Jennifer noting that Wonder Woman ran around in gold underwear and she worried about her lack of clothes. In Sunny, a girl is stuck in a Florida retirement home with her grandfather but learns meaningful lessons, and makes new friends along the way.
Dana Simpson, author of the Phoebe and Her Unicorn comic and book series – Unicorn vs. Goblins: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure will be out next February– admitted that, unlike Holm, she’d prepared nothing. Usually, she told the crowd, “I just start talking and everything goes fine.” And it did. Simpson recounted her years drawing web comics until finally landing a landmark syndication deal – she was in more papers than the first run of Calvin & Hobbes – and how the titular unicorn “wandered in” to one of her drawings and she knew it was there to stay. Near the end of her talk, Simpson told the crowd that since Holm had showed childhood pictures, she wanted to address the elephant in the room. “I used to be a boy,” she said, and went on to tell the audience about how she gave Phoebe many of the attributes that she didn’t get to have growing up as a boy before she transitioned. She credited the “incredible power of art” with allowing her to experience that kind of vicarious joy through Phoebe.
The writing and illustrating team of Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson brought their own kind of joy to the stage, where they presented their picture book collaboration, Leo: A Ghost Story. Not only did the pair talk about their individual artistic processes – it was obvious that the two were well-versed in working as a team and had their patter down to a hilarious science – but also brought Seattle’s University Bookstore’s Caitlin Luce Baker onto the stage and did an impromptu drawing for her, a knight’s crest, which ties in to Leo’s story. Judy Schachner, author of the popular Skippyjon Jones books, closed the night with a laugh-out-loud slideshow only tangentially related to her new picture book, Dewey Bob, “a hoarder raccoon.” She told the audience about how a third grader in Pennsylvania diagnosed her with ADD—she later had her British psychiatrist confirm it: “I was off the charts!” – and showed pictures of all the oddities she collects, which included taxidermy raccoons, felt matadors, nuns, bird pictures, hats, and Viking ships.
Picks of the Lists
William Ritter’s follow-up to last year’s PNBA Buzz Book winner Jackaby, called Beastly Bones, out from Algonquin, generated lots of buzz of its own on the exhibit floor. Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski’s YA debut Nightfall, which reps say is reminiscent of both Lois Lowry’s The Giver and James Dashner’s Maze Runner series, was also a popular pick in the Sales Rep Pick of the Lists presentation. Since this year marks the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the new edition illustrated by Anna Bond of Rifle Paper Co. was predicted to be a hit with families as well as young readers who want to experience Alice’s adventures for the first time. For slightly older readers, two fast-paced historical novels, Gennifer Choldenko’s Chasing Secrets and Jennifer Donnelly’s These Shallow Graves, got high marks from their reps. Both Judd Winick’s Hilo Book 1: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth and D.J. MacHale’s Voyagers series are aimed at middle grade boys looking for action-filled reads.
On the picture book side, Jory Jon is at it again with I Will Chomp You!, which reps called “the perfect read-aloud book.” There’s no way to go wrong with Dr. Seuss and the newly discovered What Pet Should I Get? is selling well, according to the Random House rep – one of the reps said her son told her “Mom, you’re blowing my mind!” when she told him that the manuscript had been discovered in a drawer. The “ultimate hipster new parent book,” The Wonderful Things You Will Be, written and illustrated by Etsy artist Emily Winfield Martin, will be a big hit for the holidays and beyond, the reps predicted. Loren Long’s Little Tree, which “is about the process of letting go,” will appeal not only to the littlest readers but also to the adults who are doing the reading, “because letting go is something everyone struggles with at some point in their life,” said the PRH rep And in the much-awaited follow-up to The Day the Crayons Quit, Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers’s whimsical The Day the Crayons Came Home is another title that not only work as a read-aloud book but will surely be one that adults without kids will feel no shame in buying for themselves. After all, who can resist a plucky pea-green crayon who dons a superhero cape and renames himself Esteban the Magnificent?
