Story Time with Author and Illustrator of Hattie and the Higgledy-Piggledy Hedge

How often do your children get to meet real authors and illustrators? Avid Bookshop is pleased to host a special story time with the author and illustrator of Hattie and the Higgledy-Piggledy Hedge on Saturday, October 13, 2012, from 1pm to 2pm.

For most children, going off on an adventure, whether in fact or fiction, sounds like fun. Many have visited grandparents or other relatives or friends. Some just hope to do so or pretend to do so when they play. Almost everyone enjoys reading about such trips. Both those reading and those read to will enjoy Hattie’s visit to her grandparents. Hattie and the Higgledy-Piggledy Hedge provides a bit of a mystery. And it ends with the quiet thrill of seeing Hattie make her dream of being an artist come true. Set in a peaceful and beautiful place, the story may inspire interest in gardens and in finding ways to meet goals even when obstacles
seem insurmountable.

Author Carol Bland Dolson has combined her love of art, gardening, and all things English to create Hattie and the Higgledy-Piggledy Hedge, the idea first beginning for her while she was traveling in England. Dolson got the idea for the story after a bed-and-breakfast stay in the southeast of England: “The hedge that surrounded the cottage was ancient, and it really did ‘dip a little here, bulge a little there, with humps and bumps just everywhere.’ When I asked our hostess about it, she said, ‘What will I ever do with the higgledy-piggledy hedge?’” In Dolson’s story, we see that a little girl named Hattie has her own ideas of what to do with that hedge.

Illustrator Elaine Hearn Rabon enjoys sketching and sculpting, but above all, illustrating. She has received praise for her illustrations that appear in Grady Thrasher’s Tim and Sally’s Vegetable Garden, Tim and Sally’s Beach Vacation, and Tim and Sally’s Year in Poems.