Elixirium

Why, it’s The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - now published in German by Coppenrath and given the perhaps more intriguing title Elixirium. Viel Spaß beim Lesen! (or something like that)

Here Come(s) THE APPRENTICES!

The Apprentices, Maile Meloy’s sequel to The Apothecary is now available!

In addition to the full-color jacket, I made about 38 black and white illustrations for the inside - only eight of which were printed in the ARCs, by the way, because I was still working on them through the end of January! So to see them all you’ll have to grab the handsome, hefty hardcover edition from...

IndieBound
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

And Books of Wonder - the frabjous children’s bookshop in New York City - has stacks and stacks of copies of both The Apprentices and The Apothecary SIGNED by Maile and me. (In fact, those copies were the first I ever laid eyes and hands on this past Friday.)

And Penguin just issued this....

MEDIA ALERT 

The Apprentices by Maile Meloy was included in the Los Angeles Times Summer Reading preview issue on June 2nd!

Bookpage featured an interview with Maile in their June issue! 

Amazon selected The Apprentices as a June Book of the Month! 

Maile’s two-week national tour for The Apprentices (to take place in early October) will be announced shortly. 

Praise for The Apprentices: 

“…readers will be glad to reconnect with these well-drawn characters and be grateful that Meloy leaves room for a third installment.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“This sober and well-constructed adventure accurately conveys the geopolitical instability of the era and is leavened with just enough magic, chaste romance and humor to appeal to middle-grade readers through teens.” –Kirkus Reviews

The Apothecary is now in paperback

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - with a whole bunch of my illustrations - is now out in paperback. It’s a pretty thing, I think, and it appeals to my magpie sensibilities.

Eagle-eyed readers (and even skylark-eyed, robin-eyed, and swallow-eyed ones) will notice that I tweaked the original jacket painting. Actually, it was more of a small-scale demolition job wherein I tore down the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, erected a new stretch of old-fashioned buildings and sprinkled some children on top of them. On second thought: maybe I just turned the bottle a bit so as to get a fresh vista, taking care not to jostle the bird in the process. At any rate, I like this version better.

And it’s nice to share some pictorial real estate with Garth Williams, whose drawing was adapted for that shiny sticker in the corner. Did I mention the book won (well, tied in the middle reader category) The E. B. White Read-Aloud Award from the American Booksellers Association?

So by all means go get a copy at...
Indiebound
Books-A-Million
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

The Apothecary: Terrific Book?

The Apothecary is an E. B. White Read-Aloud Award finalist! More here.

Trick Bird

Good words about The Apothecary from Fuse #8.

Ann Patchett on The Apothecary on Martha Stewart

Check this out - The Apothecary talk starts at about the 3.26 minute mark.

The Apothecary on The Martha Stewart Show

The Apothecary was just featured on The Martha Stewart Show!

The Tennessean’s Celebrity Column tells all about it:

Nashville local and New York Times best-selling author Ann Patchett dropped by The Martha Stewart Show to promote her new local bookstore, Parnassus Books, and share her top 5 picks for books this holiday season.

“The best thing about owning a bookstore is recommending books,” Patchett told Stewart in the episode, which airs at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. today and again at noon Monday on the Hallmark Channel. “I’ve been forcing books on people my whole life, and now I can do it professionally.”

As for the books she thinks people should read this time of year, Patchett suggests The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson, Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, One Writer’s Garden by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown, and The Apothecary by Maile Meloy.

Audience members walked away with all five books, as well as Patchett’s latest book, State of Wonder.

Parnassus Books is at 3900 Hillsboro Pike in Nashville.

An Illustration from The Apothecary

This is one of my favorite illustrations from The Apothecary and one of the ideas that came to mind when I first read the manuscript.

But sometimes the most simple ideas are the most difficult to execute. I couldn’t get the sky or the waves “right” and kept painting over and over again, getting nothing but more unhappy.

When I was in almost tearful despair, my cat Buzz jumped on my scanner and sent it clattering to the floor, and so I decided to see if it still worked by scanning my frustrating picture. And then I started tinkering with the image in Photoshop and within a few minutes I finally got the “feeling” I’d been after since that first read. My Photoshop skills are pretty rough, though, so I spent the next few days copying in ink and paint what I’d done on the computer.

The Apothecary on PW’s Best Books 2011 list

Hey! Publishers Weekly put The Apothecary on its list of Best Books 2011: Children’s Books...

Meloy’s first book for young readers is a wonderfully imagined alternate history, set as cold war tensions between the U.S. and Russia are reaching critical mass, and a secretive group of apothecaries conspires to protect the planet from all-out destruction. With magic, history, adventure, romance, and smart writing, it’s truly a story with something for everyone.

Wired Wild About The Apothecary

More about The Apothecary at Wired - including this nice comment...

Oh, and one more thing: the cover and interior art, by Ian Schoenherr, is gorgeous and pitch-perfect. There’s one image at the beginning of each chapter (and just a few scattered illustrations elsewhere); each one hints at something that will come later in the chapter, but without being too explicit. It’s a delicate balance, drawing the reader forward without giving away too much, and Schoenherr does a superb job. One look and you’ll see why Meloy said one of the most rewarding things about writing a kids’ book was getting to have illustrations in it.

NYTBR Likes The Apothecary, Too

The New York Times Book Review devotes a whole page to The Apothecary in the issue of Sunday, October 16, 2011...

Meloy weaves fantasy into a fine work of historical fiction, bringing to life the cold-war era when everyday life was permeated by fear of nuclear disaster and Russian spies lurking everywhere. More important, though, she brings to her first book for young readers the same emotional resonance that has won acclaim for her adult fiction, grounding her story in the intricacies of family love, friendship and loyalty, blended here with the complicated fluctuations of adolescence.

The review even reprints one of my interior illustrations. The cropping - or, rather, the lack of cropping - leaves something to be desired (all of my deliberately unfinished stuff around the edges is revealed), but I’ll take it.

Wordstock Interview: Maile Meloy

A great behind-the-scenes discussion of The Apothecary from the Wordstock Festival via GeekDad via Wired.com.

“And there's illustrations! SO MUCH PRETTY.”

“I have so much love for this book, guys!”

- Harmony’s Radiant Reads.

“A gem of historical fiction”

More love for The Apothecary from the Los Angeles Times.

Maile Meloy on Writing & The Apothecary (& Me!)

Early sketch for The Apothecary jacket, September 2010

From another interview with Maile Meloy, this time all the way from Australia:

Ian Schoenherr did the beautiful illustrations, and he’s incredibly talented. He really captured the texture and the fantastical element of the book, and because he has a wonderful realistic, technical drawing ability, the magical aspects feel real. He was the perfect illustrator for it.

Maile Meloy Interviewed About The Apothecary

A terrific little interview with Maile Meloy (that mentions me!):

Q: The Apothecary features some great illustrations by Ian Schoenherr; what do you think is the best way for a writer to collaborate with an illustrator?

A: I think it should be just that: a collaboration. I had put clip art at the beginning of each chapter, with a picture of something that would appear in that chapter. Ian used a few of those objects, and continued the idea that the opening image should build suspense about the chapter, but he went way beyond my little boxed images. I was limited by what I could find in photographs. He chose perfect moments and scenes from the book to illustrate, and his paintings wrap around the text, across the top or bottom of the page. They’re so beautiful, and Ryan the designer and Cecilia the art director showed me the sketches as they came in, so we could have a dialogue about it. There’s a character in the book with a wooden leg, and in the manuscript it was just a peg, but Ian drew an articulated leg with buckled straps, a boot, and visible nails to hold the sock up. I started to say, ‘Oh, that’s not the right kind of…’ and then I shut up and went back and changed the text. His leg was better.

Fondness for The Apothecary

Some nice comments about The Apothecary from...

The Picky Girl: “this is an absolutely beautiful book”

Beth Kephart: “a book that (if the preview pages on Amazon are accurate) features some very beautiful illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.”

Forever Young Adult: “We already know that you can make something cool by putting a bird on it, but this cover is so much more than a hipster cliche. I love the old school style, which beautifully captures important elements of the book. This cover is the reason why book frames should be invented, because it needs to be on my wall STAT.”

Publishers Weekly Gives The Apothecary a Star

Publishers Weekly just gave The Apothecary a starred review. And they even liked the pictures!

With evocative, confident prose and equally atmospheric spot art from Schoenherr, adult author Meloy’s first book for young readers is an auspicious one.

Dreamy About The Apothecary

Nice comments about The Apothecary at There’s A Book:

Book Dreaming is just that. It’s a feature I’m going to use to highlight those books that make you dreamy or possibly just end up making you dream about them. It could be anything from newly released books to ones that are already out that I can’t get out of my head to those I can’t seem to get my hands on soon enough!

Today’s Book Dreaming pick is The Apothecary by Maile Meloy and Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr...

Trailer for The Apothecary

I just got an advance copy of The Apothecary - and it looks great. And now there’s a way-cool trailer for the book, which uses a few of my (MANY!) illustrations.

Not since the oak-tag flip-book I made of a motorcyclist jumping over garbage cans in the 6th grade has any of my work been semi-animated.