Update

The good news is: I finished my manuscript for Thanksgiving: The True Story!! AND I just finished the picture research. I'll write more about that later. For now, I just wanted to update my blog with the news that my manuscript and picture research has gone through the scrutiny of my first-line reader, i.e. the person I live with who does a close read of everything I produce before anyone else sees it! She's amazingly thorough and terrific at spotting snags that I then fix--an intense but exhilarating and totally rewarding process.

It was a beautiful fall day & I took my 2 1/2 year old granddaughter to the zoo, not realizing that we were going see an 11-day-old giraffe!!!! WOW--we watched it(don't know its sex) walk and run a bit. Its parents were watchful and nurturing--turns out this was the first day the zoo allowed people to observe the baby. What a thrill! Interestingly it did not have noticeable baby characteristics, except for its unsteady gait. It was just a miniature version of it's parents.

One of my students introduced me to another terrific book; Mother to Tigers by George Ella Lyon, illustrations by Peter Catalanotto. It's a nonfiction picture book--the true story of Helen Frances Theresa Delaney Martini, the founder of the Bronx Zoo's animal nursery in 1944 and its first woman zookeeper. Lyon is a wonderful writer. The book is actually a hybrid because the book has illustrations instead of photographs. Althought the illustrations are wonderful, I wondered what the youngsters would think. One of my students--who was very enthusiastic about the book--read it to her first graders and they couldn't not get into the book because they couldn't grasp that it was a true story. I got the same reaction when I showed it to some youngsters of varying ages. That matched what I've been hearing from teachers--that kids prefer photographs. The piece I hadn't thought about was that photographs signal to reads that a story is true, that it "really happened." I located a copy of Martini's book My Zoo Family that had inspired Lyons and discovered that it had many fabulous photographs!!! There are pictures of Martini with the tiger cubs--Dacca, Rajpur and Raniganj, of her in the nursery she established at the Bronx zoo, etc. Having seen them, I think that Lyon's book might have been more dynamic with the photographs, instead of the illustrations.

Another terrific nonfiction picture book is Vincent's Colors, words and pictures by Vincent van Gogh, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A brief excerpt(few words describing color) from van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo appear on the left hand page, a close up of one of his paintings is on the right hand page.
Thumbnail images of the painting with information is in the back of the book. It's a marvelously expressive book.