ElishaCooper.com -- FARM

I GREW UP ON A FARM, a small New England farm with an apple orchard, and goats I milked each morning. In some ways, it was a farm out of a children’s book.

And very different from those working farms – big Midwestern farms with huge John Deere tractors rumbling through miles of flat cornfields – which are the majority in America.

So when I decided to write a children’s book about farms, I knew I wanted to write about those. I drove out from Chicago to the small towns of Illinois. It was spring. I pulled over and drew fields. I knocked on doors, talked with farmers. I became friends with one farmer, and continued to visit throughout the summer.

In the fall, after moving to New York, I flew back for the harvest. I rode in the farmer’s combine harvester (he even let me drive it).

This book tells the story of the seasons on a farm, from planting to harvesting. It’s packed with corn, cattle, pick-up trucks, barn cats. And a rooster named Breakfast.

I think children’s books sell farms short. Cute pigs, red tractors. It’s what we do to food, too. We clean it up.

The reality is much more interesting. I think children will find the reality much more interesting. I tried to get that across in Farm.

REVIEWS

Publisher's Weekly 2.15.10
STARRED REVIEW
"Cooper creates a joyful tribute to family farms in this luminous and lyrical picture book. The text is stately, quiet, and poetic ("Morning chores would be better if they didn't happen every morning"), and the book slowly takes readers through a year of planting, good and bad weather, and ordinary details about farm life."

Publisher's Weekly Q&A

Booklist 2.1.10
"[A] quiet, atmospheric portrait of a farm through the seasons. Working in his signature style of loosely rendered figures and simple compositions in pencil and watercolor, Cooper combines beautiful, expansive views of a farm...Filled with sensory details, the brief text has a poetic, stripped-down simplicity…"

Horn Book 4.10.10
STARRED REVIEW
"It's as thorough and pleasing an introduction to a farm as one could ask of a picture book."

Published by:
Orchard Books (Scholastic Inc.) 2010
ISBN 978-0-545-07075-1 $17.99