Annie Barrows is a name well-known to booksellers, given the success of the 2008 adult bestseller, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Dial), which she co-wrote with the late Mary Ann Shaffer, and her Ivy + Bean chapter books, illustrated by Caldecott winner Sophie Blackall. Launched by Chronicle in 2006, that 10-book series about unlikely best friends has made multiple appearances on bestseller lists, has won numerous awards and honors, and has sold more than five million copies worldwide. Now Barrows leaps into the picture-book arena with John Marco, the story of the youngest brother in a large family who struggles to make himself heard. The book is due from Chronicle in 2018; an illustrator has yet to be decided.
The versatile author, whose publishing credits also include the adult novel The Truth According to Us (Dial); and two middle-grade time-travel tales, The Magic Half and Magic in the Mix (Bloomsbury), has a long history with Chronicle. For nine years in the 1990s, Barrows worked as an editor for the San Francisco-based house, and acquired some of its signature adult titles of the time, including the epistolary gift book Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock, and a collection of slain photojournalist Dan Eldon’s art and journals, The Journey Is the Destination, which inspired a film that will be released in early 2017.
Barrows’s editorial tenure gave her a perspective that she believes has enriched her writing. “My work as an editor was responsible for my being able to think about stories visually,” she noted. “I give Chronicle Books the entire credit for this. I couldn’t have done that without my experience there.” Yet she still found the prospect of writing a picture book somewhat daunting. “For years, I’ve been trying to understand how anyone writes a picture book,” she mused. “I have a lot of friends who are picture book writers who have been telling me that this is the greatest thing – and I wanted to give it a try myself.
A Neighborhood Muse
Barrows discovered the inspiration for John Marco on her doorstep – almost literally. “There was a little boy who lived across the street from me, who had something like 50 older brothers and sisters,” said Barrows. “One day, looking out my window, I saw him come out into his yard and go back in. And come out and go back in. And come out and go back in. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Finally, I saw him come out and stand beside a tree in his yard for a very long time. And then the tree fell over. And then he danced. John Marco is my imagining of his experience.”
Barrows soon discovered that writing a picture book was an entirely new endeavor from her longer fiction. “It’s completely different than anything I’ve ever done – because, ultimately, I was writing half a book,” she observed. “To me, a picture book is all about the text meeting the illustrations, so I had no control over a lot of it. No, the form controlled me. It reminded me of editorial work, because the thing you are aiming to create is out of your control – you’re not creating it.”
Victoria Rock, Chronicle’s founding children’s publisher and editor-at-large, was happy to see Barrows spread her creative wings with John Marco – and to add a new chapter to their shared past. Rock, who acquired the picture book, first met Barrows when they were editorial colleagues at Chronicle, and later became the editor of Ivy + Bean. That was almost a decade after the editor and author each gave birth to their first child – a girl – on the same day in 1996. “That was pretty momentous at a relatively small company,” Rock recalled. “As our daughters got to be six or seven, our conversations about them became the genesis for Ivy + Bean.”
The editor credits Barrows’s knack for capturing the essence of childhood for the widespread appeal of her first series – and her success at shaping her new picture-book protagonist. “I think one of Annie’s great talents is that she can so perfectly recollect what it’s like to be a kid,” Rock said. “She talks about how her own kids inspire her, yet I know how well she clearly remembers details of what it was like for her at that age – and that’s also obvious with the character of John Marco. Annie is such a capable writer, and I feel that all options – all doors – are open to her.”
Barrows is pleased to leave those doors wide open. “I think I do have more picture books in me,” she said. “Working so tightly and writing to non-existent illustrations is tricky and fascinating. I’m just getting started – why would I stop now? But I also want to write books for early readers and middle readers and grown-up readers. I want to run the gamut – I want to write everything! Except math books.”
