Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
My children and our acres of milkweed inspired this book about the day in the life of a little boy and his brother and sister. Local photographer Gabe Cooney took the pictures. The children were four, six, and eight at the time. We called the title page picture of Adam in the photographer’s oversized
An original fairy tale about a fisherlad who meets a magical talking fish and rescues her, done with his own skills and not magic. I love the story, but the pictures puzzle me. It is clearly a Celtic story–all the clues are there: a green island, a coracle (a skin boat) and references to Irish poets and Scottish folk
This folk parable of friendship began with the rock-and-roll song “Joy to the World” in which the group Three Dog Night sang “I’m a deep sea diver, I’m a rainbow rider. . .” and it started me thinking. English illustrator Michael Foreman’s glorious color-drenched pictures
Another one of my original fairy tales, this story came out of our nine-month camping trip in Europe, and especially our time in Greece. A boy with wings is born into a poor herder’s family, and he is considered deformed. But when he saves his father during a freak snow storm, he is
An original fairy tale, this story is about a girl whose overprotective father tries to keep her from all things wicked, unhappy, trying, or real. At last the wind blows in over the garden wall and woos her, taking her into the ever-changing world. A fifth grader at the Smith College Campus School pointed
This is a straight-forward original fairy tale in which a miller’s son, who has the gift of understanding the speech of animals, finds a bird that can speed time up or slow time down or stop time altogether. With the bird’s help, he rescues a princess from a wicked giant. Interestingly, I began writing the
An original fairy tale set in Thailand and based on a line in my kite research which said that the king had kite mandarins who flew his kite at night to keep his soul above the terrors of the night. The story, written during my Quaker phase, is about speaking truth to power no matter what the cost.
I worked on this little rhymed book while we traveled for nine months through Europe, before we had children. But even then I knew the kind of mother/child catechisms of big and little, loud and soft–and how-much-do-you-love-me. Bolognese’s drawings of an African-American family were way ahead of their time.
A very New York City book fueled by our recent European trip and the Prince spaghetti commercials of the day in which a young Italian boy is summoned home by his mother’s shouting. This book is about a boy whose name is so long it’s a botheration.
This is the story of a selchie, human on land and seal in the sea, who is adopted by a fisherman and his childless wife. They raise the boy, Greyling, and keep him from the sea, fearing that if he turned back into a seal he would never return. And then one fateful day, Greyling dives into the sea to