I've been wanting to read the Wildwood books since seeing the beautiful sting video for it in 504.
It's a middle-grade adventure/fantasy story and looks exactly like my cup of tea. Since I've decided to explore children's publishing in this module, I think it's about time I ordered the first book!
I've studied and made picture books before but they have always been early readers/pre-reading books because I haven't had the time to write longer stories. I would really love to write a book for this age range and embrace the challenge of illustrating bigger chunks/chapters of text. Looking at Wildwood will help me to see how Carson Ellis has achieved this: analysing the format of the illustrations, the relationship between art and text (and author+illustrator) and also get a real feel for the adventure/fantasy genre.
While I wait for that to arrive, here's some photos of my drooling over it in Waterstones. These are paperback versions, so I imagine that the hardback copies feel even more precious and special than these do.
The covers are elegant and really beautifully illustrated. It's immediately obvious that this is an adventure story as the result of capturing the children on the front running - running to or running from something? - intriguing and exciting, suggests a fast pace, a journey, an adventure.
It's interesting to see that a serif typeface has been chosen because that's not typical of children's publishing. Serif fonts are often deemed too sophisticated/complicated for young readers but these books are for middle-grade readers (7-12 years) so might be trying to establish a step-up from 'childish' books and a stepping stone to the teen/young adult genre.
The covers remind me of the Narnia Chronicles by C.S.Lewis. I remember feeling really grown-up and clever when I moved onto the 'free-reader' zone in the school library and I got to choose which books I wanted to read. I was a bookworm and a daydreamer, so it had to be fantasy, but I was also aware that I was too big to be reading fairy stories. I thought looked clever reading these books, especially reading a series of books and being able to say "I've read the whole series". Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings looked too boyish to me.
These full-page illustrations have caught my eye because they don't interfere with the text. They're on a completely separate page, like colour plates (although this one is black and white), presented more as 'figures' in the book, not illustrating that page but a reference for the reader to go back and find. It feels momentous to reach these pages and it's almost a reward for reading all that chunky text when you finally get to another picture.
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