Book Giveaway – ALL EARS, ALL EYES – Richard Jackson.

All EARS, ALL EYES is a beautiful book. I want to thank Caitlyn Dlouhy at Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books for arranging to provide us this book for one lucky winner. All EARS, ALL EYES came out this week, so it is available for purchase. If it looks familiar that’s probably because you visited Illustrator Saturday last week. Katherine Tillotson’s gorgeous art was featured. Don’t miss reading how she created the illustrations. Here is the link.

All you have to do to get in the running is to leave a comment. Reblog, tweet, or talk about it on Facebook with a link and you will get additional chances to win. Just let me know the other things you did to share the good news, so I can put in the right amount of tickets in my basket for you. Check back to discover the winner.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Shh…look…listen…to the sounds of the dark say Goodnight!

What sails? What flies? Those…these, Down low, nearby, far off, up high.
Who listens? Who looks? Who hears? Who sees?

An homage to the melodies of nighttime, to each critter that sings, hoots, or glows, All Ears, All Eyes takes us on a moonlit journey where the landscape shimmers with Fantasia-like beauty. Where if you look and listen, you might spy an owl, a deer, a chipmunk—or—what else!—before falling asleep.

BOOK’S JOURNEY:

ALL EARS, ALL EYES pays tribute to a family night in 1970, when our children were seven, four, and three.  We lived in the country, across a road from a working dairy farm.  Between our old houses stood a woods, less magical than Katherine Tillotson’s, but no less mysterious.  After midnight one evening, I woke to hear a fox chortling and yipping among the trees.  The sound was eerie, witty.  We thought the children must hear it, so we roused them from their beds and, in pj’s and robes (and bare feet), we went outside onto the grass between our porch steps and the woods itself.  The fox kept yodeling; the kids listened hard, transfixed.  We were heeders, we were watchers (though seeing was difficult); we belonged in this natural world, and yet we did not.

We didn’t enter our woods that night, except in our imaginations.  Instead the woods entered us.

When I was small, my mother took in a piece of advice which she followed and which has influenced my life ever since: “Develop the senses.”  Our young family’s woods night was sensory—and so a sensory book has emerged from it.  At one time there was a house shown, and a father and child.  But they intruded somehow, they became almost instructional (was any of the text “spoken?”—No).  They were eliminated.  The book required three years to make.  New ideas for illustrations led to new words.  New thoughts for rhymes led to new images, maybe even different lurkers in the green and blue shadows (“Vole hole” was the last bit of text to show up).  I have charts tracking rhymes in a rainbow of colored pencils.  I have, it seems, hundreds of questioning e-mails between Maryland (where I live) and California (where Katherine lives).  Verizon wants me to delete them, but I can’t bring myself to oblige—book talk, on this project particularly—was vital to the process.  A shared wonder from 1970 has become a wonder shared from 2014-2017.

RICHARD’S BIO:

Richard Jackson is a long-time editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers and the critically acclaimed author of Have A Look, Says Book, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. In starred reviews, School Library Journal touts it as a “…celebration of sharing a book together” and Publishers Weekly proclaimed it “a shoe-in for the bedtime rotation.” He is also the author of All Ears, All Eyes, illustrated by Katherine Tillotson. Recognized for his distinctive taste in children’s literature, in 2005 he was named as the ALSC May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecturer. He lives with his wife and near his grandchildren in Towson, Maryland.

 

Thank you Richard, Katherine, and Caitlyn for helping me to show off your book. I can’t wait to add this to my collection of picture books. Amazon. B&N.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy