Pajama Press

Pajama Press is excited to announce that four of our authors and author/illustrators will be touring as part of TD Canadian Children’s Book Week 2016.

Rebecca Bender, author and illustrator of the Giraffe and Bird books and illustrator of Peach Girl by Raymond Nakamura

Wallace Edwards, author and illustrator of the forthcoming Once Upon a Line

Sarah Ellis, author of A+ for Big Ben and Ben Says Goodbye

Margriet Ruurs, co-author of A Brush Full of Colour: The World of Ted Harrison

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week is an annual festival that celebrates Canadian children’s books and the importance of reading. This year 30 authors, illustrators, and storytellers will travel to events in every province and territory, presenting to over 28,000 participants.

Visit the Canadian Children’s Book Centre and the  TD Book Week website to learn more.

“With Once Upon a Line, Wallace Edwards has catapulted himself and his books to the status of must-haves for any home, school or public library.  The USA may have Chris Van Allsburg and most notably The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, but teachers will now be scrambling to use Once Upon a Line instead as the go-to book for story-starters and creative writing projects based on intriguingly unique illustrations that get the creative juices flowing.

…Once Upon a Line is so rich in its visual effects and textual texture that it deserves all the golden stars on its cover and more.”

Click here to read the full post.

“Great-Uncle George was a magician whose “enchanted pen” has created an array of fancifully surreal illustrations, each begun with the same-shaped pen stroke and each accompanied by a brief story starter. Great-Uncle George’s mustachioed portrait appears next to a succinct history of the fictional magician and his special pen: “With this pen he would draw an ordinary line. That line turned into a painting. He drew the line many times and painted hundreds of paintings, but all that remains are the ones that you see in this book.” Readers are then invited to find that line—duplicated on the first page—and to “finish each story.” The colorful, absurd, detailed illustrations feature a fantastical array of characters—many of them anthropomorphic animals—in an intriguing style that defies easy classification. Each absorbing illustration includes a sentence or two, always beginning with the titular “Once upon a line” and ending with ellipses….The artwork is captivating, finding the pen stroke is challenging, and the text will spark some animated conversation. (Picture book. 4-9)”