Following in Her Tracks! Big Machines: The Story of Virginia Lee Burton by Sherri Duskey Rinker

For everyone in seaside Folly Cove, Virginia Lee Burton was just Jinnee.

Anyone who meets Jinnee will tell you that she is quite magical.

Jinnee Burton was a lovely, graceful woman--a strong professional dancer, a skillful journalist, an artistic soul who loved fabric design, gardening, and all the animals on her small farm, and to her two small boys, Aris and Michael, she was a wizard who could draw anything they wanted. And what they wanted was Big Machines--huge, honking machines, movers and shakers, strong, powerful, and capable of making and doing almost anything. Just like their mother Jinnee.

It begins with a line: black and rough.
Then a squiggle... and a rub.
As little Aris watches, a puff
of smoke appears, clears,
and then...

WHOOOooo oo oo! a whistle cries.
"I see a train!" says Aris! "More! Do more!"

Choo Choo was Jinnee's first picture story of a little runaway train. But then it was Michael's turn to choose, and he wanted a big digger that could build big things, and Jinnee created a steam shovel who dug great railroad beds, highways and runways, and foundations for skyscrapers, but wasn't too proud to dig a cellar for a schoolhouse for his owner Mike. That was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. But her boys wanted still more, so Jinnee's magic wand created a heroic little snowplow, and along came Katy and the Big Snow and then the hill-climbing Maybelle the Cable Car.

And then Jinnee had an idea that combined the quaint cottages of her beloved Folly Cove with the big trucks and trains and diggers and builders her boys loved. It was her memorable Caldecott Award-winning The Little House, a delightful story about both the big machines that changed the American landscape into great cities but also a story of returning to the roots, a grassy hillside home for the Little House, a parable that was both of its time and surely ahead of its time in its contemplation of urbanization.

Virginia Lee Burton was a American original who captured the spirit of her time in stories that delighted children while resonating with grownups in their ethos of hard work and loyalty and their sense of place in mid-century American. And Sherri Duskey Rinker's new celebration of Burton's work Big Machines: The Story of Virginia Lee Burton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) is also a celebration of the art of the picture book itself. Newbery winner John Rocco (for Blizzard) puts his superb draftsmanship to work portraying Burton's art perfectly, even showing her hands at work, sketching and painting her trademark illustrations, right down to an idyllic apple tree with swings for Aris and Michael beside the happy little pink house we all know and love.

Rinker, whose best-sellers Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site and Mighty, Mighty Construction Site pay skillful writerly homage to Burton's big machines stories, follows Burton's lead, giving the Arises and Michaels of today what they wanted--"More!" A first purchase for all libraries and picture book lovers everywhere.

Some Biography! Some Writer! The Story of E. B. White by Melissa Sweet

The Master of Ceremonies spoke. "The fame of this unique animal has spread to the far corners of the earth, attracting many valuable tourists to our great state. You will all recall that day last summer when the writing appeared mysteriously on the spider's web in Mr. Zuckerman's barn. This miracle has never been explained. All we know is that we are dealing with supernatural forces here, and we should all be proud and grateful. In the words of the spider's web, this is 'Sooome Pig'."                                                                                                                       --Charlotte's Web

In 1952, E.B. White (known as Andy) was already well-known, one of the founding writers at the New Yorker magazine. A much loved youngest child, well-educated, a father, and a husband of a co-writer at the magazine, White's first love was rural Maine where he had a small farm, and where one of the best-loved children's books of the twentieth century, Charlotte's Web, had its genesis in the death of a pig.

One warm afternoon in Maine, Andy's pig failed to appear for supper. As Andy wrote, "When a pig (or a child) refuses supper, a chill wave runs through a household." Andy worried.

When he awoke the next morning, his handyman was already digging the grave.

Although death was part of life on the farm, the death unsettled Andy. He looked for redemption--he wanted to find some way to save a pig's life..... But by what miracle on a farm could a pig's life be saved?

By virtue of his joyful childhood at home and at his beloved lake in Maine, big-city writer Andy White was in touch with the land, the people, and especially the animals he knew as a child, and out of these memories and a magical imagination White created two other classic novels for young people, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.

Although his books for children were few, being a writer who said "I believed in the goodness of the word," White wrote voluminously, working at the New Yorker from 1925 to 1982, and saving most of the letters he received and sent, latter collected in Letters of E. B. White and co-authored the perennial best-seller, the American writing guide familiar to most college and graduate school scholars, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition.

E, B. White was quite a prolific and wide-ranging writer, but it is his work for children which secures his place in literature, and it is those gently redemptive stories that reach down to the very heart of life--justice, love, honor, and self-sacrifice--that have led to Melissa Sweet's forthcoming Some Writer!: The Story of E. B. White (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

Author-illustrator Sweet is one of the masters of the art of the collaged illustration, and E. B. White's voluminous output, lovingly saved by his family, becomes the stuff of her illustrations and the source of her inspired narrative, built around the framework of his three seminal children's novels, which have produced what we can only call some biography.  It is a gloriously visual and moving memoir, in which Sweet often allows White's own voice tell his own story,  Much is of that story is told in the layered illustrations which combine old photos, Sweet's own drawings, bits of letters, vintage supplies--gummed labels, folders, typed letters--and most importantly, samples of White's early drafts in his own hand and typewritten, which show how a great author works to hone his language to a simple perfection.

Sweet's illustrations are softly lovely and perfectly fitted to her text, written to the tune of White's own immediate and intimate style. Each page is a work of art in itself, enticing the reader to spend time taking it all in and enabling even the reluctant reader to understand what lies behind the love of words that enables a writer to share his memories and thoughts with the world. This biography would be wonderful used in conjunction with a classroom novel study of one of White's books.

One of publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's strong suits is their outstanding nonfiction for young readers, and Some Writer!: The Story of E. B. White is a winner in several ways, for its lovely text, as a biography, as an illustrated work, and as a solid biography of a significant twentieth-century American writer, with solid backmatter in the form of a timeline, notes, bibliography, and index.

Telling the Tales of A Wimpy Kid: Jeff Kinney by Christine Webster

Jeff began writing Diary of a Wimpy Kid very quickly. After a while, he realized that much of what he was writing was not very funny. He decided he needed another plan. Before he started writing an actual book, he dedicated his time to coming up with 77 idea pages. From here, he would choose only the very best ideas on these pages.

It took Jeff four years to fill those 77 idea pages. He then cut 80 percent of the material he felt was not worth putting in the book. He was not sure his diary idea would ever have a chance of being published. Jeff pitched his idea to Charlie Kochman, a comic book editor.  Charlie immediately liked it. Here the idea of making Wimpy Kid a series for kids was brought up. Jeff was skeptical, but he agreed to revise Wimpy Kid for younger readers.

And so a bunch of bodacious best-sellers was born!

Success didn't come easy to author-illustrator Jeff Kinney. A kid who loved funny books, such as Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, and Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins series, Kinney was drawn right away to cartooning. Early on, even as his college newspaper comic strip Igdoof was a hit at the University of Maryland, Jeff realized that he wasn't much of an artist, not even as a cartoonist. He went to work as a programmer, designing a website, Poptropica, and kept on trying to peddle his comic strip to newspaper syndicates with no success. But while he kept his day job, Kinney also kept on working on various comic ideas, keeping a journal of ideas, and slowly he settled on a comic stick-figure style with episodes based on the life of a clueless seventh grader. Admittedly incorporating many of his own worst qualities as a middle schooler, Kinney kept on drawing and revising his story, shaping his collection of jokes and cartoons into a connected narrative, working late into the night while his family slept.

And then his first book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1, was published  into almost instant best-seller status, with almost as many adults as kids among its fans, making his hapless hero Greg Heffley an instant literary celebrity.  Kinney may not be a stellar cartoon artist, but he has the magically sensitive ability to portray his benighted and self-centered seventh-grade anti-hero sympathetically, in a way that stirs all those embarrassing memories for grown-ups and resonates with the experiences of 'tween readers.  All of Kinney's characters are immediately recognizable to readers, from his pesky little brother Manny to his equally hapless but always gung ho buddy, Rowley, his snarky garage-band rocker big brother Rodrick, and the rest of the middle school milieu,  all of  which manage to  get in the way of  Greg's only life goal, to reach the top level in Twisted Wizard.

Christine Webster's, Jeff Kinney, with Code (Remarkable Writers) (AV2 Books, 2012), the opener in the biography series Remarkable Writers, features a clear description of the years of  hard work and constant revision that went into Kinney's runaway success--to date six best-sellers and a very popular movie spin-off.  Webster points out the many failures that led to this success. and the drive, life choices, and frequent changes of direction that resulted in Kinney's career accomplishments. The author also provides additional supplementary and back matter--a timeline, a breakdown of the biography as a literary type, a quiz on the facts in the text, and a audio-visual online link with even more information for book reports or browsing. Jeff Kinney comes across as a real person, a guy, a dad, and  a writer with whom many kids can identify and perhaps emulate in finding their own futures, and this series helps young readers go right along with him in the creation of his best-selling and beloved character.