Book Giveaway: A PARLIMENT of OWLS by Devin Scillian

Devin Scillian has written a new picture book, A PARLIMENT of OWLS, illustrated by Sam Caldwell and published by Sleeping Bear Press. They have agreed to send a copy to the one lucky winner in the US.

Just leave a comment. Reblog, tweet, or talk about it on Facebook with a link and you will get additional chances to win. Let me know other things you did to share the good news, so I can put the right amount of tickets in my basket for you. Sharing on Facebook, Twitter or reblogging really helps spread the word for a new book. So, thanks for helping Devin and Sam.

If you have signed up to follow my blog and it is delivered to you everyday, please let me know when you leave a comment and I will give you an extra ticket. If you want to make sure you don’t miss seeing that you won, please click “Notify Me of Follow-Up Comments by Email” box. I will leave a comment in reply if you win the book. Thanks!

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

From a mischief of mice and a shiver of sharks to a caravan of camels and a rhumba of rattlesnakes, animals from around the globe gather a group and sashay, swim, slither, or sail through this party of animal plurals. The only question is “What to call this animal arcade? This critter convention? This zigzag zoo? This purring and preening parade?” A delightful and colorful romp through the perfection of animal plurals from the author of Memoirs of a Goldfish!

BOOK JOURNEY:

I’m not sure when my fascination with the collective nouns for animals began.  But whether it was a “murder of crows” or an “ostentation of peacocks” I’ve long loved the intersection of the animal kingdom and wordplay. I’m not sure why we have herds, flocks and packs when we can instead have shivers, rhumbas and pandemoniums.  And I was fairly certain it was ripe fruit for a book.  And yet…  What did I really have?  Just a collection of words that I loved but that lacked any cohesive and compelling narrative.  (Call me old school, but I tend to find a cohesive and compelling narrative as fairly necessary for a satisfying manuscript.)

So, like many of my books, the general idea rattled around in my head for a long time before I ever sat down to commit anything to the page.  But one day as I went through a long handwritten list of my favorite animal collectives (the one that may have tipped the whole thing over was the finding that a group of narwhals is called a blessing) I started to wonder at what the collective of these collectives might be called.  And little by little, I cobbled together a gathering of these many groupings, these caravans, quivers, convocations and colonies, into one big gathering that I called (spoiler alert) a paradise.  (It was a fascinating exercise — here I was researching and assembling all of these great words and yet I found myself needing to come up with one of my own.)

I realized that I had created at once a complicated illustration challenge and yet one that was rife with potential and possibility.  And when I first saw the sketches that artist Sam Caldwell had conjured from his home in Scotland, I was elated.  Sam clearly relished the challenged and, as I always hope as an author, our partnership created a whole that I have to believe is greater than the sum of the parts.

My love affair with words isn’t universal, of course.  And yet, can anyone remain unmoved by learning that a group of hummingbirds is a charm?  Surely not.

DEVIN’S BIO:

SAM’S BIO:

Sam Caldwell is a children’s illustrator and designer based in Glasgow, UK. He grew up in the north of England and studied painting at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Sam is represented by Good Illustration

Here are some of his Published Books:

• Explore Your World: Weird, Wild, Amazing!, Published by Hardie Grant Egmont
• Sneaky Shadows, Published by Berbay Publishing
• The Mystery in the Garden: Wodge and Friends, Published by Hardie Grant
• Tales of Ancient Worlds, Published by Neon Squid
• Wodge and Friends: Take the Stage, Published by Hardie Grant
• The Book Family Robinson, Published by Templar
• A Parliament of Owls, Published by Sleeping Bear Press
• Do Bears Poop in the Woods?, Published by Thames & Hudson

His Clients Include:

• Hardie Grant Egmont  – The Guardian – The Independent – Neon Squid – Macmillan
• Évian resort – Sleeping Bear Press – Hachette – Bonnier publishing – Egmont – Asda

Devin, Thank you for sharing your book and journey with us. This book is so interesting. I loved your sharing the names of various animal groups and and what they are called. I love how you brought together groups animals around the world and wove in the unusal names used to describe them. Kids will enjoy their time reading this fun rhymic text and Sam’s wonderful illustrations will have them laughing and turning each page without realizing they are learning collective nouns. I’m sure parents will learn something, too. I knew the names of some of these groups, but others were so perfect I swore they were made up, so I looked up each one and I found them all. This is a book to keep, so when you refer to a group of pandas as an Embarrassment of Pandas or a group of bats as a Caldron of Bats, you can pull this book out when they laugh and say, “You’re making that up.” Good Luck with the book!

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy