Featured Authors or Illustrators are selected each month and archived here. Check back often to find more suggestions for great reading.
To view previous months, please click on the dates below:
May 2010
Graeme Base
Brief Biography
Graeme Base was born in Amersham, England but moved to Australia at the age of 8. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and three children.
The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery
Inspired by a summer of reading Agatha Christie novels, The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery provides hours of entertainment. Horace's eleventh birthday party was a magnificent occasion with ten different guests, eleven games to play, and a feast of eleven favorite dishes. When it is time for the feast, they find someone has eaten all the food, but who? Hidden in the exquisite illustrations are clues, messages, and codes that reveal the culprit. If you get too frustrated trying to find all the clues or you just get stuck, there is a section at the end of the book revealing the inside story.
Animalia
This amazing alphabet book can be examined by all ages for hours. Each highly detailed illustration features numerous items beginning with the featured letter. Perhaps the most well-known page is the Lazy lions lounging in the local library where you can find book titles including: Limericks by Edward Lear, Love's Labours Lost, and Lady Chatterly's Lover in addition to a locomotive, a leprechaun, a lizard and much much more.
The Sign of the Seahorse: A Tale of Greed and High Adventure in Two Acts
This environmentally themed underwater adventure is written in verse. When the animals realize the coral reef is dying, Corporal Bert the soldier crab goes in quest of the cause.
Jungle Drums
Ngiri Mdogo, the smallest warthog in Africa, is sick of being mocked and being ugly and wishes things could be different. When the trickster Old Nyumbu the wildebeest gives Ngiri a set of magical drums, his wish comes true creating chaos among the many animals. Somewhere on every page is a hidden picture of Old Nyumbu.
The Water Hole
Illustrated by Tom Pohrt
(One of The Children's Bookstore Staff's Favorite Novels of 2009)
In The Water Hole, Base combines previous themes of the environment and animals into a counting book. Following the water hole through an annual cycle of plenty and drought, the water hole (with cutout hole) shrinks until the rains come again and the animals all return. Each page features a different region of the world with its specific flora and fauna. As indicated on the title page with a rhyming hint, 100 hidden illustrations of animals are spread through the pages of this beautiful book. (Now available as a board book.)
The Discovery of Dragons
First issued in 1996, a second edition with more dragons was released in 2007. This book of Serpentology features beautiful illustrations, notes on the various species of dragons, maps and the letters of 4 famous dragon spotters from history: Soong Mei Ying (a thirteenth century teenage daughter of an obscure Chinese silk trader), Bjorn of Bromme (a ninth century viking), Dr. E. F. Liebermann (an obscure nineteenth century Prussian cartographer and amphibiologist), and Francisco de Nuevo (a sixteenth century New World explorer). Full of tongue in cheek humor, The Discovery of Dragons is another picture book for many ages.
TruckDogs
In a far-off desert world, evolution has taken a strange turn and produced the TruckDogs: part animal, part machine. This is the story of how a young and unlikely TruckDog saves his world. 16 full-color dossier illustrations add to this entertaining adventure.