This post was originally published on this site
Not everyone gets to say this: my son wrote and illustrated a book for my birthday, and you can buy a copy for yourself!
It started out as two pages of a calendar. He didn’t finish it in time for my birthday, so he printed out copies of what he had completed so I could get an idea of what was coming.
But a calendar is only good for one year. And I found the first two illustrations so intriguing that I asked him to write out the story behind them. Little did I know, there was no story! He made the illustrations to show the weather and seasonal characteristics of each month, and put the man in each one for interest. I couldn’t imagine making such fascinating images without having a story in one’s head. But as my son explains
I had made twelve illustrations that weren’t even primarily designed to tell a story, and now I had to retroactively paste a story on top of them. All the things a story needs—tension, conflict, plot development—were nowhere to be found in the drawings. I had to find a way to include these elements in the story, while following the course set by drawings which lacked them!
What my son came up with was a horticultural fable, in which the old man searches for a rare, possibly mythical plant in hopes of making a name for himself.
The old man’s travels take him through landscapes breathtaking, forbidding, and otherworldly by turns, and his exploration of this mythical land parallels an inner transformation he did not anticipate.
It’s a picture book for adults (and children with large vocabularies). Any gardener who is fascinated by tales of plant collecting or determined to grow plants no one else is growing will enjoy this book. Children will pore over the illustrations even if the vocabulary of a scholarly old man is a bit above them.
My son published this under a pseudonym. Why? I’m not quite sure. But he has other projects in the works that are very different in scope and style, and I think he didn’t want to have his name associated with this. He only made it available to the general public because I (and several of his friends) thought it deserved a wider audience. There is a free excerpt at the link below if you want to check it out.
The Cindervale Pearl makes a great gift for armchair adventurers and plant lovers alike. Available in hardcover, paperback, and pdf from https://bit.ly/Cindervale.
