Jane Yolen — Works Category » Full List (by Pub. Date)

Lost Boy

Read the rest of Lost Boy »

(0) Posted by admin in Children, Coming Soon, Full List (Alphabetical), Full List (by Pub. Date), Picture Book

Elsie’s Bird

ELSIE’S BIRD

Illustrated by David Small

Philomel September, 2010

ISBN# 0399252924

I was in the doctor’s office years ago, waiting for him to come into the room, and reading the Smithsonian Magazine. In it was a story about East Coast women who moved west to live to the Nebraska territory. Often these women went crazy because there were no identifiable sounds there. It was too big a place, too wind-through-prairie-grasses where they were more used to the tidy cities or the comfortable farms of the East. Some walked out into the tall grass until they were totally lost and died. But the ones who’d brought along canaries seemed to survive at a higher rate.

And of course, I thought: there’s a picture book here.

When I wrote it—and actually when I sold it to one of the many editors who originally turned the book down—it was the story of a young Boston woman who falls in love and goes west with her new husband. She brings along the bird, sticks close to home (the sod house) until one day the bird escapes the cage and flies out the window, and she has to go retrieve it.

The editor (the marvelous Patricia Gauch) sat for some time on the mss. and then said that it needed a child at the center. Make it the farmer’s little girl. And I said an immediate no. Then thought a minute and added, "Wait, let me try it." And no sooner had I gotten a very rough bit down than I knew Patti had been absolutely right. She also got one of her award-winning illustrators, David Small—an artist who I admired greatly and enjoyed personally—to do the illlustration. He also lies in that area and his wife has made a spectacular "prairie garden."

Now I subscribe to Smithsonian but have never gotten another picture book idea out of it. Yet.

What reviewer’s have said:

“City kids will marvel as I once did at the notion of losing yourself in a vegetation usually cropped and pruned into respectable lawns. Country kids will find a soulmate in a girl so in love with a bird that she casts herself in harm’s way to aid him. And parents will be equally entranced by Yolen’s wordplay and Small’s inventiveness. Quiet. Contained. Original. A keeper.”—School Library Journal

Search for Out of Print Books (U.K.)

(0) Posted by admin in Children, Coming Soon, Full List (Alphabetical), Full List (by Pub. Date), Picture Book

Read the rest of Come to the Fairies’ Ball »

(0) Posted by admin in Children, Full List (Alphabetical), Full List (by Pub. Date), In Print, Picture Book

Categories