How to Make a Bird

by Meg McKinlay, Matt Ottley (Illustrator)

Overview

Stunning imagery and moving language let imagination take flight in an ethereal primer on making a bird.

Breathe deeply and take your time.
The making of a bird is not a thing to be hurried.

To make a bird, you’ll need hundreds of tiny, hollow bones, so light you can barely feel them on your palm. So light they can float on air. Next you’ll need feathers for warmth and lift. There will be more besides—perhaps shells and stones for last touches. But what will finally make your bird tremble with dreams of open sky and soaring flight? From award-winning author Meg McKinlay and celebrated artist Matt Ottley comes a lyrical and lovely picture book that shows how small things, combined with wonder and a steady heart, can transform into works of magic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536215267
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.34(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Meg McKinlay is an award-winning author of children’s books and novels. Her picture books include DUCK!, illustrated by Nathaniel Eckstrom, and Duck for a Day and No Bears, both illustrated by Leila Rudge. Meg McKinlay lives in Australia.

Matt Ottley is an award-winning artist as well as a musician and a Yamaha-endorsed composer. His illustrations have appeared in more than three dozen books, but How to Make a Bird is his first book with Candlewick Press. He lives with his partner in New South Wales, Australia.

Editorial Reviews

A child imagines, designs, and builds a bird only to let it go and watch it soar through the clouds. . . Observant readers will catch subtle visual details that flesh out more of this lyrical, visually beguiling tale. This story, infused with an ethereal, wondrous tone, is for creative souls everywhere, those who know what it is to imagine something and to experience the joy of bringing it to life with care—and the bittersweet feeling of letting it go and moving on. . . Imaginatively stirring and altogether haunting, this one stays with you.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

An elegant, confident voice narrates this gently uncanny second-person-perspective book, following a brown-haired, light-skinned child who builds a bird from scraps, watches it come alive, and sets it free. . . . A beautiful rumination on creating.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2021-03-02
A child imagines, designs, and builds a bird only to let it go and watch it soar through the clouds.

The child—a preteen, with pale skin and tousled brown hair—lives, apparently alone, in an elevated stilt house on a beach. The house stands precariously on tilting legs and is painted, as are many of the landscapes in the book, with a slightly distorted perspective, as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. The child collects tiny, hollow bones and shapes them into a bird; adds feathers; gives the creature a heart, eyes, beak, claws, and a song; and adds “final touches, the way an artist adds her last few brushstrokes, her tiny signature.” In one spread, it appears as if the child could be gently breathing life into the creature. Standing atop the teetering house, the child releases the bird and feels simultaneously “a kind of sadness, a kind of happiness.” The book’s measured pacing builds tension (“Breathe deeply and take your time”) as readers witness the creative artist at work. Observant readers will catch subtle visual details that flesh out more of this lyrical, visually beguiling tale. This story, infused with an ethereal, wondrous tone, is for creative souls everywhere, those who know what it is to imagine something and to experience the joy of bringing it to life with care—and the bittersweet feeling of letting it go and moving on. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.9-by-20.2-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Imaginatively stirring and altogether haunting, this one stays with you. (Picture book. 4-10)

Kirkus Reviews