Honeybee

Kirsten Hall is a former preschool and elementary school teacher who has authored more than a hundred learn-to-read stories for emergent readers. Today, she is the founder and owner of a boutique children’s book illustration and literary agency, Catbird Productions. Hall is the author of the picture books The Monarch, The Gold Leaf, and The Jacket, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2014.Isabelle Arsenault is an internationally renowned children’s book illustrator whose work has won many awards and much praise from critics. Her books include Virginia Wolf by Kyo Maclear, Cloth Lullaby by Amy Novesky, The Monarch by Kirsten Hall, and Jane, the Fox, and Me by Fanny Britt, which was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book. The poetry expressed through Isabelle Arsenault’s graphic universe, the gentleness of her lines, and the overall charm of her books have made her one of Quebec’s best-known and most esteemed illustrators. Visit Isabelle online at IsabelleArsenault.com.

"Kirsten Hall (“The Jacket”) teams up with the gently magnificent illustrator Isabelle Arsenault (“Cloth Lullaby,” “Colette’s Lost Pet”) to bring readers the story of one year, from spring to spring, with the honeybees of a single hive. Hall’s charming text proceeds in lightly cadenced lines.... Arsenault’s illustrations capture something of the alien vision of bees — bees see a “bee purple” in flowers that is invisible to us — through a neon orange that she uses sparingly amid paler gouache, pencil and ink landscapes. Her flowers and grasses are drawn impressionistically, while the bees themselves are made more emotionally legible with cartoonish eyes and even smiles. Children will love tracing the erratic paths of the honeybees, and come away with a not too distorted sense of the little honey factory inside the unprepossessing, and previously terrifying, hive. The hexagons of honeycomb, as drawn by Arsenault, seem so perfect as to be fanciful precisely when they are fact."