Award-winning author-illustrator Tomie dePaola’s death in 2020 was an enormous loss for all who knew him, for the world of children’s books, and for the many fans of his artwork. But it turns out there was another gift still to be added to his legacy. At the time of his death, dePaola had completed a manuscript—and had begun conceptualizing illustrations—for a project very near to his heart. Seen here for the first time is the cover for Where Are You, Brontë?, a tender picture book about love and loss featuring dePaola’s beloved pet Airedale, Brontë, and illustrated by Barbara McClintock. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will release the book on May 6, 2025.
The roots of the project run deep. According to S&S art director Laurent Linn, also a close friend of dePaola’s, the author-illustrator had grown quite reflective about his own life in his later years. As an example, he meditated daily and wanted to create a book for children about meditation and mindfulness. “I’ve never known anyone like Tomie who could know the mind of a child, and not in a didactic way, bring challenging, even hard, concepts to a story and make it accessible,” Linn said. The result was the picture book Quiet, published in 2018. After that, Linn noted that dePaola was thinking a lot about loss and how to deal with that concept in a book for very young children. His eventual approach was “to make it very personal,” Linn said. “Kristin [Ostby, then dePaola’s editor] and I would go up to his house and discuss this, and he decided it would be the story of Brontë’s life with Tomie, and would really focus on where Brontë is now, because Brontë is gone.”
Brontë, who died in 2016 at age 12, had been dePaola’s devoted and constant companion. “He was Tomie’s family,” Linn said. “The bond they had was so clear and the way Tomie cared for him was very special,” he added, noting that many of the rhythms of the Brontë-Tomie dynamic are carefully detailed in the book. “And so that it wouldn’t be frightening or scary, but at the same time very realistic that Brontë has passed away, without saying it in the text, it’s shown in the art,” he said.
DePaola had completed a spare, poetic text and was about to begin work on the illustrations in early 2020, but the process became more difficult for him as he faced health challenges. Everything then came to a halt when he died of complications from surgery following a fall.
“It was beyond devastating,” Linn recalled, “and it was right when we were all in lockdown after the pandemic hit. It was really a hard time for the world, for everyone, and we thought, ‘Let’s just not think about this book and just get through what we have to get through.’ ” After a bit of time had passed, Linn said that various conversations among dePaola’s inner circle—Bob Hechtel, his friend and manager of his studio and estate; Doug Whiteman, his agent and former publisher at S&S; Ostby, and other S&S colleagues—led in one direction. “Everyone agreed that it would be such a tribute to Tomie to have this book in the world,” Linn said. “And because it’s extremely personal, it’s a way of celebrating Tomie’s life as well as the last thing he wrote.”
The core group came to another consensus in deciding that Barbara McClintock should be the artist to pick up the mantle and illustrate his book. "There was no one better than Barbara,” Linn said. “She has the sensibility, like Tomie did, to show a narrative with deep emotional connection with the idea of loss, and take something that’s very personal and featuring Tomie, but make it universal too. And they knew each other a bit. Tomie really admired her and thought she was a phenomenal illustrator.”
McClintock remembers the moment she first learned about the book. It was a little more than two years ago, and she was sitting outside while attending an event at the Highlights Foundation in Pennsylvania. “I got a phone call from Laurent Linn asking me if I’d be interested in doing a project,” she recalled. “He said it was the last manuscript that Tomie dePaola had written.”
As Linn proceeded to describe the story, he couldn’t have known that McClintock’s much-loved 16-year-old Siamese cat had just died the week prior. “I was very much dealing with the process of grief and loss, so the timing of this was pretty extraordinary,” she said. “Laurent and I talked—about pets and family and loss [Linn had also just lost a cherished cat]—for maybe 20 minutes as I was sitting on this porch looking out over a field. We were laughing, we were crying. Everything about the book resonated with me, and it was such an honor for Laurent to think of me illustrating it. I was just bowled over.”
She felt another level of appreciation for the invitation as well. “I wanted to honor the memory of Tomie and the communal grief that we all were experiencing over his sudden departure from this mortal coil,” she said. “It was something I very much wanted to do; it seemed almost meant to be.”
McClintock’s enthusiasm for the project only grew once she had the manuscript in hand. Readers will see Brontë grow from puppyhood into old age and experience blindness, but “the story then is really about Tomie coming to grips with his grief and coming to understand that Brontë is still with him and will always be with him,” she noted. “The manuscript is breathtaking—just the simplicity and frankness of how it’s written is very inspiring.”
By the time McClintock began working on the book in earnest, Ostby had left Simon & Schuster for Greenhouse Literary Agency and executive editor Celia Lee had come aboard as editor of Where Are You, Brontë? Lee, Linn, and McClintock went back and forth on how to approach the artwork. “It was very important to all of us that Barbara was able to make this her book, too,” Linn said. “I told her she had the complete freedom to make it her vision and not try to think what would Tomie have done.”
DePaola’s presence still loomed large in the collaboration. “I really endeavored to blend my style with Tomie’s,” McClintock said. “It almost felt like he was in the studio with me as I was working on things, because I became so deeply embedded in investigating and exploring interviews with him and photographs of him, and Laurent was a huge help.”
In addition to referencing his longtime friendship with dePaola, Linn could also rely on a treasure trove of photos of dePaola’s home, studio, and art that Linn had taken for the updated biography The Worlds of Tomie dePaola by Barbara Elleman (S&S, 2021). “What’s depicted in Where Are You, Brontë? is based in reality,” Linn said. “It’s [McClintock’s] interpretation of what his home and studio look like, but it has that specificity that makes it very real,” he added, pointing to one of those bits of research. “Tomie had a wonderful drawer of scarves and a wonderful box of glasses—and those really were his signature. Barbara had a lot of fun with all kinds of scarves that he would wear.”
DePaola’s fashion signatures are showcased on the book’s jacket. “It made perfect sense to show how Tomie, as an artist, was dealing with what had happened by drawing a picture,” McClintock said. “So we see Tomie at the drawing board, and he’s in the process of drawing a picture of Brontë. And then you see Brontë’s bed empty near the drawing board. This is Tomie in his natural element, doing what he loved to do and what he did best.”
McClintock says that there is also an interior image of the book that is very special to her. At one point, dePaola and Brontë are shown driving off to a dinner party and then a double page spread at the center of the book depicts a table with Tomie sitting at the head and characters from his books gathered around. Among the guests are Mrs. Beulah Bowers, Tomie’s elementary school art teacher; Andy and Sandy, Oliver Button, Strega Nona—and the book’s editor Lee, and art director, Linn. “Serving them all a humongous bowl of spaghetti is, of course, Big Anthony,” McClintock said with a laugh. “I really wanted to celebrate some of the many, many characters that Tomie brought to life and created.”
The strands of emotional connection woven into the project have made it memorable for Linn as well. “It has been incredibly healing for me,” he said. “I did have Tomie in my head a bit as I was designing it, because of the typefaces, the font choice, deciding how much of a spare white page to have with the art—all the things that I had worked with him on, wondering if he’d be happy with it, too. When people see Where Are You, Brontë?, it will show that it was made with love in every aspect.”
Where Are You, Brontë? by Tomie dePaola, illus. by Barbara McClintock. Simon & Schuster, $19.99 May 6, 2025 ISBN 978-1-5344-1850-9
