Boston's Book Nook Blog~ No "Borders" for Jan Brett's Artistic Talents

One of the most fascinating aspects surrounding the children's book industry is the vast assortment within style, linguistics, illustrations and imaginative scope. 

Unlike other literary facets, successful authors and illustrators of young readers are renowned for establishing the realism of a theme while incorporating original concepts of fantastical worlds and fantasies.

Due to children and adults have different scales of reading interests and comprehension, the requirement of a writer/illustrator to accommodate both audiences makes this one of the most difficult careers to begin and sustain. 

In the case of a writer and artist being one in the same, their strength and brilliance to integrate both the visual and auditory stimuli becomes detrimental to the thriving results of the story.  

Native Bostonian and author/illustrator, Jan Brett, has proven through decades that not only does she possess this gift, but she can also add her own ingredients to cooking up the perfect recipe for children's literature. 

Born on December 1, 1949, Jan Brett realized her passion for fairy tales as a young child growing up in Hingham, Massachusetts where she recalls, "I remember the special quiet of rainy days when I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books." 

She continued this passion as a student at The Boston Museum School where she spent hour upon hour in the neighboring building of The Museum of Fine Arts. Enchanted by the grandeur of architecture and artistic compositions, the MFA played a massive role in the future of her talents as she admits, "It was overwhelming to see the room-size landscapes and towering stone sculptures, and then moments later to refocus on delicately embroidered kimonos and ancient porcelain. I'm delighted and surprised when fragments of these beautiful images come back to me in my painting." 

Books particularly reflecting this experience are "The Twelve Days of Christmas", "The Mitten", "The Hat" and her first published story, "Fritz and the Beautiful Horses."   

Travel also had a strong impact on Brett's literary reputation by extracting creatures, demographics, people and culture from countries such as Scandinavia, Japan and Africa. Within one of her hit books, "The Three Little Dassies"(rendered after the classic, "The Three Little Pigs"), she cleverly places the story within Namibia, bringing along attributes of landscape and animal characters. 

"The Three Snow Bears" is another example of her translation techniques as she intertwines the storyline of "Goldilocks and The Three Bears" with details of an igloo and polar bears which were inspired during a trip to the Arctic Circle. 

Other differentiating attributes to Brett's work are her bordered pages of artwork,  giving the reader a preview of the story's future out comings.  "Gingerbread Baby" and "Gingerbread Friends" are perfect examples of this notable characteristic.

Today, Jan Brett has more than thirty-million books in print, reflecting her deep love of community, animals and imagination. Her stories have far extended the purpose of bedtime reading becoming a teacher's aide in classrooms across the country. With the aid of her website activities, teachers are excited to implement her lesson plans benefiting areas of language arts, science, social studies and even math. Educating, entertaining and enthralling both the child and the parent is a challenging task, especially when combining the two spheres of artistry.   

Brett clearly magnifies an inherent genius within both realms, bestowing a blessing of magical influential upon children everywhere.