Jan Brett’s new book tour
By Zachary Lewis
[email protected]
Jan Brett is releasing a new book, Alice in a Winter Wonderland, on Tuesday, Nov. 26, and is traveling to 17 cities in 23 days to get the word out on her newest story, which she wrote and illustrated over a two-year period. Brett has won many awards and is a New York Times No. 1 bestselling author.
The author and illustrator of The Mitten, The Nutcracker and The Snowy Nap, among countless other books, is launching her new book tour at Oyster River High School on Friday, Nov. 29, in partnership with Durham Public Library and Gibson’s Bookstore. Registration for the 530-seat event is already at capacity.
“Everybody knows about Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was published in the 1800s. I always loved the book when I was little. I loved the whimsy of it. I loved the topsy-turvy-ness. It sort of reflected the way I used to feel as a child. It’s like you never know what’s coming up next,” Brett said.
Brett has put a twist on the story. “I set my book in Alaska, because I wanted to take away from the very British … sides and references to that part of England. The Cheshire Cat, there was a kind of cheese in Cheshire that had this cat on it, and so [Carroll] put that in the book.”
The beauty of the tundra, past and present, inspired her too. “I’ve always been fascinated by glaciers and the glaciation of North America and how human beings lived there,” she said.
“There were all these megafauna from the Pleistocene that lived at the same time as human beings. I thought that was really, really cool. I’ve always loved that idea and wished I could travel back in time,” Brett said, “so I found a way to travel back in time through this story. [Alice] falls through the rabbit hole. It was a hole in the glacier and then she finds an underground world.”
The Cheshire Cat is converted into a Pleistocene animal, the smilodon.
“Smilodon is a saber-toothed cat. It’s got these huge fangs, and it … lived in the United States, in Alaska and really North America, more like Canada, along with woolly mammoth, short-faced bear, which was a huge, wooly rhino. There were also mastodons, which is another kind of elephant likely to have fur, so I put those in the book,” Brett said.
One ancient hoofed mammal that is still around today is Brett’s favorite. “Actually we have one creature that I’ve been really obsessed with, which is a muskox…. It’s like a very, very furry kind of half-ox, half-sheep kind of animal. I’ve done a couple books about it.”
Despite updates to the classic, Brett’s adaptation is a sincere and thoughtful retelling.
“Probably one of my favorite pages is the griffin because I think it’s such a cool creature. It’s supposed to guard treasure and you see it in the Middle East, but it’s a mythic figure that obviously Lewis Carroll really liked. He loved puzzles and math, so I tried to tip my hat a little bit to that,” she said. Carroll was a Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church, a college at Oxford, and his knowledge and curiosity about the world made his book a joy for countless generations. Brett puts the same care into her new telling of the story.
“I tried to put a lot of little puzzles in it,” Brett said. “I loved to just get my pointer finger out and just like go around the page and see what I could see and maybe there would be something fun to look at and something that would be informative…. It’s not like everything has to have a reason. It’s just fun to be able to spot things, so that was the underlying reason for all the detail and why it took two years to do it.”
At each stop of the tour, Jan Brett will talk about her story and take time to sign books.
“Every time I do a book I write about how I got the idea,” Brett said. “Hopefully [readers will] go to those places someday and extend their frame of reference and if they themselves want to be a writer or an artist they’ll just say, ‘Oh, look at this, this is the way she does it. I wonder how I’m going to do it?’”
Featured image: Courtesy photo.
