A Place To Call...

My fireplace mantle this morning.

Whether it's at the end of a walk on a forest trail, the end of a day of teaching or the end of an extended journey, walking through the doors of my home has an immediate calming effect.  It's not the structure itself for I've lived in a tent, a motel room, apartments, small houses, new houses, old houses and large houses.  It's not the setting for I've lived in a neighborhood with sidewalks and on country roads away from cities, in the woods and next to a lake.

No, it's all about the place, the space inside, where a sense of belonging and security surrounds you.  It's a sanctuary for those who live there.  In her debut picture book, Home (Candlewick Press, February 24, 2015) author illustrator Carson Ellis presents her remarkable perceptions of homes.

Home is a house in the country.
Or home is an apartment.

For sailors at sea, their dwelling needs to float; an intricate network of lines, masts and sails making them move.  On land stepping back in time First Nation dwellers fashion homes using trees and bark. Imagined majesty, hidden from view or inside a shoe, homes may come from the pages of Arabian classic literature or Mother Goose rhymes.

In a European country or under the ocean's waves, these residences reflect those who live there.  We cheer, dance and sing but at the close of the concert, the musicians, the members of the band, head out on the open road in their rumbling bus of a home.  Impeccable or rather chaotic, towering or tiny, these structures are all home to someone.  Tanks for fish, hives for bees and a shell of a tree provide habitats.

Then we get to wonder who would live high on a cliff, under mushrooms, or beneath a dome on another planet.  We travel to Slovakia, Kenya, Japan and to the realm of a Norse god.  We are inside the kitchen of a Russian grandmother, the bedroom of a resident on the Earth's moon and the leafy nook of a raccoon.

We turn pages following our winged guide until we land in a creative corner.  It's a gathering of all we've seen, a collection of concepts for homes.  It's a starting point, an ending and a beginning.


Very simple sentences, more like observations, encourage readers to stop and take a look.  Carson Ellis suggests we gaze around us, go back to the past, open a book or spin a globe, to see and dream about places people and creatures might live, real or imagined.  She asks us to look at any home and wonder about the inhabitants.  When she shows us her home, then inquiring about our home, she makes this journey a shared experience, an intimate conversation between her and the reader.  Here are several other pictured passages.

Clean homes.  Messy homes.
Tall homes.  Short homes.


When you open the dust jacket (I'm working from an F & G; albeit a beautiful one.) the back is a varied steelier shade of the teal seen on the front.  The twenty-one homes shown on the front indicate we are in for a rare exploration of homes from the present, past, nature and the imagination.  The precise layout, in a word, is stunning.  The red on the dust jacket supplies the color for the opening and closing endpapers.  When the next page is turned, as our eyes move from the left to the right, we see the vee in a leafy tree branch offers a place for a bird's nest.  In the center of the title page a dove is in flight.  Above the branch the publication information and dedications appear.

Heavier matte-finished paper is the precise canvas needed for these illustrations rendered in gouache and ink.  All the lettering is done by hand.  Carson Ellis has an eye for flawless design.

Using a limited color palette the images extended across the gutter from page edge to page edge.  You will want to pause at each one, not wanting to miss any of the details; the items in the apartment windows, the monkey walking on the ship's line, the delicate trees and flowers, the clothing worn by all the children, the knights riding seahorses or what's cooking in the babushka's kitchen.  Carson Ellis brings us full circle using the dove as an element in every two pages as well as herself, seen in the first and last home.

One of my favorite illustrations is of the little forest world.  Ellis uses a teacup (seen in several other images) to give us perspective.  Everything is in miniature; the flowers, ferns, mushrooms, the snail, butterfly, lichen, bugs and shrew.  The little, little red-roofed house with smoke coming from the chimney with tiny articles of clothing hanging on the line is exquisite.


Debut picture book author illustrator Carson Ellis has given readers a gift sure to send our minds soaring as we view her Home.  We are left wanting to know more about those residences we pass every day, those we long to see or those we find in reading.  It's a book with answers and many more wonderful questions.


Please take a moment to learn more about Carson Ellis by visiting her website following the link attached to her name.  She has a new FAQ section.  Carson Ellis presents a guest post about this title at PictureBook Makers.  Author and blogger, Julie Danielson, talks with Carson Ellis about her book at Kirkus, Home Sweet Home with Carson Ellis.  Danielson follows with illustrations on her blog at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.  Carson Ellis writes a letter to her readers posted at the Candlewick website.  UPDATE:  Please take a moment to view the video of Carson Ellis speaking about her home and this book at Carter Higgin's website, Design of the Picture Book. 

Into The Wood...

Nothing quite tops the thrill of entering the pages of a good adventure; the lure of the unknown, the challenge of unprecedented risks and the pure excitement of a new undertaking.  For an author to articulate the compelling spontaneity of the action well, is never easy; conveying the characters' thoughts, emotions and assessments.  With the makings of a classic, Wildwood:  The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I (Balzer + Bray) written by Colin Meloy with illustrations by Carson Ellis, is a story addressing every element of a such an escapade creating a realm few will want to leave.

Beginning with the very first line (duly noted in my journal of gripping first lines) readers are swept up in the whirlwind as are the two protagonists of this tale.

How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the least of her worries.

After a typical day in Portland, Oregon, taking care of her one-year-old brother, Mac, while her parents scout out an art fair, Prue, twelve years of age, is relaxing on a park bench only to watch in amazed fear as a murder of crows kidnaps her brother.  Shaking herself as if from a trance, Prue follows on her bike, the attached red wagon bouncing along like a pinball, through the streets of the St. Johns neighborhood to the bluff above the Willamette River.  In despair she stares as her airborne brother disappears into The Impassible Wilderness.

At all costs her parents must not discover her brother is missing.  Despite warnings from her father to never venture into that area Prue knows, she and she alone, must bring her brother home.  Leaving early the next morning her journey begins but nothing could have prepared her for what she will encounter including secrets from her parents' past.

Ready to cross the railroad bridge into the wilderness, she encounters a fellow classmate Curtis, somewhat of a loner and thinker, who is determined to follow regardless of Prue's insistence he return.  What the two discover is The Impassible Wilderness is another world altogether.  Here what they believe to be true about the world in general must be abandoned if they are to survive.

In short order Curtis is taken captive by a band of coyote soldiers walking on two legs, appropriately if shabbily attired, and talking.  Making her way to a main road Prue hails a red mail truck bound for South Wood knowing she must leave Curtis, for the time being, in what is called Wildwood.  Crossing through The Avian Principality, the country populated and ruled by birds, she and her new friend, Richard, the postmaster, travel to seek an audience with the Governor-Regent; hoping for assistance in locating her brother.

Through three parts, twenty-eight chapters and 541 pages readers are held spellbound by the narrative as it flows back and forth between the perils of Prue and Curtis as each attempts to find their way in and out of danger in a world on the brink of upheaval.  A host of characters, the dark-hearted Dowager Governess, commander of the coyote army bent on revenge, the bureaucratic menagerie of South Wood, a group of bandits, hearts like Robin Hood of old, prowling the woods, Owl Rex, supreme ruler of The Avian Principality, Septimus the rat, the Mystics, guardians of The Council Tree among the peaceable folk of North Wood and Prue's parents, all play their parts like notes in an intricate symphony.  It's a battle of the highest order, a fight between good and evil, a fight for life.

In this debut novel, Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists, displays his gift as a weaver of words depicting an extraordinary world, rich and elaborate in detail, set among an ordinary world equally defined.  In Prue and Curtis, as well as the secondary characters, struggles with personal values, definition of self and how one fits into the grand scheme are convincingly portrayed with vivid descriptions.  The feeling of being smack-dab in the middle of the events is clearly tangible.

There was a sudden rush of wind, and she looked up in the sky and was horrified to see that the group of crows had grown twentyfold.  The individual birds were now indiscernible from the mass, and the murder coalesced into a single, convulsive shape, blotting out the flat light of the afternoon sun.  The shape swung and bowed in the air, and the noise of their beating wings and screeching cries became almost deafening.  Prue cast about, seeing if anyone else was witnessing this bizarre event, but she was terrified to find that she was alone.

His warnings had no effect on Prue, who kept marching up the wooded slope, steadying herself on the trunks of the trees as she hiked.
"And coyotes, Prue!" continued Curtis, scrambling up the incline but stopping at the first tree of the boundary.  "They'll tear you apart! There has to be another way to go!"
"There isn't, Curtis," said Prue. "My brother's in here somewhere, and I have to find him."
Curtis was shocked.  "You think he's in here?" Prue was far enough into the woods now that Curtis could barely make out the red of her scarf through the bramble of trees.  Before she disappeared completely from view, Curtis took a deep breath and stepped into the woods. "Okay, Prue! I'll help you find your brother!" he shouted.

At the Wildwood website linked above, a video conversation between Colin Meloy and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, relates their collaboration to bring this title to fruition.  Ellis is well known in the world of art for her distinctive fine line drawings.  Illustrations in this title were first drawn in pencil on watercolor paper prior to being recreated in ink and paint.

Readers are treated to a map of The (Impassible) Wood on the book's endpapers.  According to an interview at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast this title showcases 85 illustrations; six as color plates.  Intrinsic to the narrative, giving readers a window into this magical world within our world, her drawings are remarkable in how they invite the reader into the story and in their conveyance of emotion.

The combination of writing by Colin Meloy and illustrations drawn and painted by Carson Ellis in Wildwood:  The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I is a true melding of vision, art and heart.  I, for one, can not wait to read it again, probably when the next book in the trilogy, Under Wildwood:  The Wildwood Chronicles, Book II, is to be released in September of this year.  Excelling in every aspect, this fantastical adventure is a definitive title in the field of literature.