San Diego Union Trib on Once Upon a Banana

Neither a long nor particularly interesting review, but publicity is publicity.

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The glamor of it all

Last week I drove to the warehouse of a book distributor in Poughkeepsie, New York, to sign about 200 copies of The American Story. Here you see some of the stacks of books awaiting my John Hancock.
Thanks to my friends at Bookstream, most of them were presold, meaning their book store accounts had already ordered them, mainly for holiday sales.
By the way, my favorite pen for signing color printed books -- most authors/illustrators will agree, by the way -- is the Sharpie. This year saw the debut of the click Sharpie, a retractable. In other words, you don't lose the cap. That pen just glides over glossy paper like a penguin on ice. I got through all 200+ books in about 35 minutes.
I've used up two click Sharpies so far signing The American Story. (The red one and the navy blue one. Patriotic, get it?)

Hmm... I wonder if there's a product endorsement in it for me?

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Bananas on Tour

So David Small and I take the midwest by storm this week for Once Upon a Banana, and then take the banana to the Big Apple. Judging from the store event calendars we will be following in the footsteps of Lemony Snickett (The End) and Geraldine McCaughrean (Peter Pan in Scarlet) most of the way. Talk about tough acts to follow! But, I have every confidence in the sublimity of the banana.
Here's where you can meet us...
November 1, 7:00 Harry Schwartz Books, Brookfield, Wisconsin
November 2, 7:00 Anderson's, Downers Grove, Illinois
November 4, 11:00 Borders, La Grange, Illinois
November 5 1:00 Books of Wonder, New York City (Note: this is Marathon day. Beware crowds, traffic, etc.)
November 6 6:00 Sweet & Vicious, New York City (Wait! That's a bar! Yes, it's the children's lit bloggers gathering.)
November 7 10:00 Barnes & Noble, Carle Place, New York

See all the space in between those bookstore appearances? That time is largely taken up with presentations at schools. My role in our joint presentations will be confined to "I wrote a manuscript with about twenty-seven words and David did the rest," and then let him draw. This is the best part of doing an event with an illustrator. He gets to wow the crowd and I get to bask in reflected glory. Sweet!

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Why I won't see the burning of the Samhain Wicker Man

My friend Michael has built a 30 foot tall wicker man for a ritual bonfire on Samhain next Saturday night, at a secret location outside Saratoga. (The "mh" is pronounced as a "w" -- don't ask me why they don't use a "w." These are Celts, people. Celts. Enough said. ) We've just had a few inches of rain and the ground is all mud, so Mike has held off bringing in the crane to hoist the man upright. In the good old days of pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain this wicker fellow would be built large enough to hold hostages -- preferably Roman hostages -- as bonfire sacrifices. Evidently we haven't been succesful at rounding up hostages, so attendees of the bonfire are encouraged to bring other ritual offerings, specifically, symbols of our attachments. (How 21st Century, to turn a Druidic rite into therapy.)


Happily (or unhappily, as the case may be) I am saved the soul-searching required for this particular event, as I will be out of town. I will actually be in no town at all, en route from Chicago to New York City on a book tour. I will be in the in-between.

I will, however, be requesting a window seat, keeping watch for the sparkle and glint of bonfire on the horizon from 25,000 feet. Burn, wicker man, burn.

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Detroit Free Press says...

...The American Story is like "walking through a museum of American history."

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Politics: utterly local, i.e. personal

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Article/Interview Once Upon a Banana in PW

This Publishers Weekly editor interviewed me, David, and editor Paula Wiseman for this piece.

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Theodore Taylor has passed away

This was one of my very favorite books as a kid. On the one occasion where I had a chance to meet Mr. Taylor, I was too shy and awed to introduce myself. That's what happens when you enter a field with your heroes standing before you. Thank you, Mr. Taylor. Thank you for this book.

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Art from Once Upon A Banana at Society of Illustrators

Paintings by David Small from our crazy banana book can be seen starting tonight at The Original Art show at the Society of Illustrators gallery.


The Society of Illustrators is located at 128 East 63rd Street (between Park and Lexington Avenues)
New York, NY 10021-7303

I'm having some trouble uploading these images or there would be one here, believe me.

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Recess! Radio review of The American Story

"And through Armstrong's sure, clear prose, all of these tales have a fresh, mythic energy to them, even when they are about the familiar figures and events that have and continue to shape our cultural consciousness."

This radio program on children's culture comes out of Florida, so I'd say they liked the Florida stories in the book...

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Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch

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Trip to Philadelphia and environs

I like the word environs.

On Thursday evening I arrived in Doylestown, at Booktenders Secret Garden, a children's only bookstore. David Wiesner, Deborah Heiligman, and I presented our respective new books to a nice crowd, and autographed into the evening. Friday a.m. I was whisked off to an elementary school in Doylestown, where I met Roger Roth for the first time. We did a joint presentation where he not only showed slides of the artwork of The American Story but drew pictures. The students had made paper quilts of their own favorite stories from the book, and presented them to us as gifts. Autograph, autograph, autograph. We then went with our media escort, Joan, to Haverford to Children's Bookworld, to sign more books, and then to a private school in the area where we did another presentation. More books to sign! Then Joan took me to Moorestown, New Jersey, to the warehouse of Koen-Levy book distributors, where I signed about 100 books. Then to Philadelphia, where I crashed for the night. Next day, Roger and I did our presentation at the Chester County Book & Music Company where C-Span did not tape us because they weren't able to get a qualified camera crew. Huh? Oh well. But we had a great turnout, and signed another ton of books.

Here's Roger drawing Ben Franklin.

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Cybils children's book awards now accepting nominations

This is a new award (I mean new, new as of this week) created by the children's literature blogging community. You don't have to be a blogger to nominate a book. You can nominate books in several categories, i.e. NONFICTION. That would be a useful one to nominate, oh, I don't know, maybe THE AMERICAN STORY for. And then there is the PICTURE BOOK category. Gosh, let me think, who has a great picture book coming out next week? Oh yeah, me. ONCE UPON A BANANA would be very pleased to be nominated.
People, don't make me ask my mom to do this! But I will. If I have to.

Cheers!

p.s. Today's theme song is "Sailing to Philadelphia" by Mark Knofler. See you all at Chester County Books & Music Company with the C-SPAN crew.

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Win a copy of The American Story

My new website includes two monthly contests, with two chances to win an autographed copy of The American Story for your classroom or home library.
C'mon, what are you waiting for? Give it a shot!

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Nice review in Jellymom.com of The American Story

*** The American Story - 100 True Tales From American History by Jennifer Armstrong. Illustrated by Roger Roth.
Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (August 22, 2006)
ISBN: 0375812563
Review by Lisa Barker
Jennifer Armstrong has knitted together a patchwork of American tales that are sure to delight the young (grades 4 - 7) and the old. As she states in her introduction, this is not a comprehensive or traditional timeline. It's a book of stories that will give children a more vivid, more alive perspective of history. And it does. My children will devour this book out of sheer pleasure and learn quite a lot about the events and personalities that shaped our country. This is definitely a history book that can inspire your children to crave and seek more.
Not only are the stories short and written in a newsy, informative and engaging style, but the illustrations bring the stories to life. Armstrong covers the years from 1565 to 2000 with some interesting obscure stories you might never hear inthe classroom (but you might hear from your grandparents) mixed in with the very well known and that's what makes the book so unique, interesting and enjoyable. This is a great adition to the family library and a treasure to hand down from generation to generation.

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Googlefight

This site searches your keywords and sees which one gets the most hits. I had Godzilla fight my dogs, and my dogs won. Why this cracks me up I don't know, and of course it has nothing to do with my books, but it's a great time waster...

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How to peel a banana

With the publication date of Once Upon a Banana approaching, I'm going to start tossing some silly fruit things your way. This article in Slate Magazine cracked me up. If you like to take bananas with you when you travel, and are plagued by banana damage, try this product, or this one (although it is rather obscene.) Here is a blog devoted to banana art and here is what is purported to be the most photographed object in Australia. Sadly, according to the site, a frequent comment by return visitors is "it's not as big as I remember."

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100 Titles for Reading and Sharing in 2006, selected by New York Public Library

Includes The American Story. Thank you NYPL.

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Anyone can write a children's book

I swiped this from Fuse #8. It's hysterical.

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CSPAN correction -- Chester County Book & Music Co.

Oopsie. I gave you all the wrong place. On October 21, at 12:30, Roger Roth and I will be at CHESTER COUNTY BOOK & MUSIC CO. in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is where the Book-TV crew will be taping us.

Sorry!

Please come see us there and be on t.v. with us.

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Diggin' that Motown sound...

Actually, it wasn't Detroit proper, it was Dearborn. Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA) fall trade show was this weekend. I flew out on Saturday, and presigned 225 copies or so of The American Story for the "Children's Book and Author" breakfast. The breakfast itself was Sunday a.m., and the other speakers were Nikki Grimes, Jon Muth, and Paul Zelinsky. I delivered my American Story speech, which I've been giving all fall. Nikki Grimes read many of her poems. And both Muth and Zelinsky drew/painted for us. Two Caldecott medalists making pictures before your very eyes is a huge compensation for having to give a speech at breakfast.
Then, speaking of Caledecott medalists, David Small and I signed Once Upon a Banana for a very very long line of booksellers. "How do you write a wordless book?" they asked. "Well," said I, "It's not wordless." David suggested I put the manuscript here on the blog so people can see what it actually looks like. I think I may well do so, but not just yet. Essentially the manuscript is text with art direction. I said, "David, you don't want authors to start sending in lots of instructions with their manuscripts." He sort of rolled his eyes at that -- imagine if picture book authors all began telling painters how to paint! Normally, authors have no input on art, but in this case, the story actually takes place in the illustration, not in the text, so I had to write a very skeletal outline of the action for the text to mean anything at all.
FOR EXAMPLE...
Please Put Litter in its Place (Man drops banana peel, misses the garbage can)
No Parking in this Space (Another man gets out of his car, slips on the banana peel)
And so on. Very rudimentary, a simple precis of the action. It takes a visual thinker such as David Small to figure out how to make it work. Which he did, brilliantly. He made the original culprit a monkey, and the entire visual sequence snowballs from here....

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Listen to me on The Book Report -- right here, right now, just click

A good long interview with two dedicated booksellers from Louisiana. The beginning of the program is an interview with Karen Cushman, talking about her latest book, The Loud Silence of Francine Green; my interview starts about half-way through the file. I did this interview on Wednesday of this week, one day after surgery on my arm. All things considered, I think I sound pretty cheerful.

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Signing at Children's Book World, October 21 to be taped for CSPAN - Do you want to be on the telly?

If you live near Haverford, PA, come to Children's Book World on October 21 to meet me and Roger Roth. We haven't figured out yet what we're going to be saying or doing for a presentation, but whatever it is, it will end up on CSPAN. This is quite a nice thing, since CSPAN/Book TV rarely covers children's books these days. Please come and be part of the audience. I don't know exactly what time we'll be at the store (or when the segment will air) but the store can give you info on the first and hopefully I'll be able to get information on the latter. Roger Roth, illustrator of this fine picture and all the pictures in The American Story, lives in Pennsylvania, and this will be our first joint appearace.

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Website finally up and running

After many weeks of work, my new site is up and running. It has been redesigned to feature me as the go-to writer for history for children. Perhaps a bold assertion, but why not?

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Bedtime Stories for Ethiopia

Sit back. This will be a long post.

Once upon a time, not very long ago, my dear friends Emma and Marc adopted a baby girl from Ethiopia. They are loving and kind and smart and they have money and great resources, both personal and material. It has always astonished me that their little girl started life under circumstances that weighed heavily against her. Ethiopia continues to be a country where infant and child mortality rates are among the highest in the world. With ongoing warfare and the AIDS plague decimating the country's resources and population, a child born in Ethiopia has pulled the short stick in life's lottery. For this little girl, that all changed when Emma and Marc became her parents, and from being one of the unluckiest children, she became one of the luckiest. Today she is healthy and beautiful and the world is at her feet.

This summer, Emma began to talk about returning to Addis Ababa to do a photo shoot at the orphanage (Emma's a top-drawer portrait photographer). Why not come with? she asked me and two other friends. We began to talk about what such a trip might entail, and then began to consider what we could take as gifts for the children of Layla House. In no time, we conceived of Bedtime Stories, an effort to take books and pajamas and toiletries to these kids. Most of these kids will be adopted into American families, and the orphanage includes English lessons in its school program. So children's books in English, along with warm pjs (at high elevation, Addis gets quite cool in the winter) are at the top of the wish list.

Last Saturday I was doing an educator appreciation event at our local B&N. While signing stock copies of The American Story afterwards, I asked the community relations manager if the store has a policy for donating books. When I explained the project, she said she could run a book drive -- that it would be the simplest thing to do and I could get as many books as I wanted. "100?" I asked, thinking about bulk and weight for our luggage.

"Done," she replied.

I came home and wrote a long email to her outlining the project in more detail, and then an amazing thing happened. She called the next day to tell me that while she was briefing members of the staff about the project, a customer overheard her and offered to buy the books, up to $500.

(You can say what you like about greedy, materialist American culture, but we're still the most generous people in the world.)

I then had the great pleasure of going to the store to select the books -- board books, counting and color books, visual dictionaries, graded readers, flash cards, picture book biographies, books about the seasons, American holidays, books about the states, books about your first day of school - and silly books, fairy tales, animal stories, books with pictures of brown children and pink children, books about puppies and soccer and trucks. I have never had an experience like it -- knowing that these books would be, for many of the children at Layla House, their first glimpse of America, the place that with a turn of Fortune's wheel, will become their home. Families in the United States are waiting to adopt these kids, but as quickly as the children at Layla House are matched with a waiting family, another infant, or toddler, or sibling group, arrives at the orphanage -- left parentless by poverty, disease, or civil disorder.

I know that we don't help the country by swooping in and taking their children. But we help the children. Perhaps when they are grown they will return to the place of their birth and do something more, something to help end war and famine and plague. Until they are ready to do that, they need good books, good food. They need good.

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The American Story on Parentworld.com

"For the middle school crowd, here’s a perfect intro to American history from the year 1565 to 2000. True stories include those of Benjamin Franklin and his kite, Sam Wilson (aka Uncle Sam), Iwo Jima, Watergate and even the mad case of Pac-Man fever that swept the nation in the early ‘80s. Delightfully vivid illustrations accompany each story making this book a real treasure."

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The American Story in Tacoma News Tribune

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Starred Review in Publishers Weekly for Once Upon a Banana

"Armstrong (Chin Yu Min and the Ginger Cat) and Small (So You Want to be President) join forces for this sublimely silly wordless story, which brings to mind a silent short by Laurel and Hardy (who make a cameo appearance). The action gets underway even before the title page, when a street juggler's pet monkey runs off and steals a deli's outdoor stall. Blithely ignoring the sign reading "Please put litter in its place," the monkey tosses the banana peel on the sidewalk, thus triggering a book-long, slapstick-rich chase that covers an entire city center and ensnares a cavalcade of characters, including a passel of dogs, an airborne baby and a banana-packed dump truck. The running joke is that none of the street signs meant to impose order on urban life ("4 way stop," "Keep off the grass!" "Look both ways") has any effect on damping the mounting chaos, and in the twist ending, the juggler winds up a hero. Small's loose yet precise ink lines and watercolor wash seem ideal for these crowded streets where anarchy abounds. He clearly relishes choreographing the huge, motley cast and effortlessly connects the geography of one spread to another; the pages overflow with enough pratfalls and comic asides to reward many readings. Even the closing endpapers play a role, tracing the chain of events."

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