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The Little Press
that Can |
Does It Again! |
| Gingerbread House Keeps Wowing
Reviewers and Scooping Up Awards |
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It isn’t every start-up
children’s book publisher that can boast 20 important international awards and
citations for its original titles, but it’s even more astonishing when the list is
comprised of only four books, and the press is run from a converted bedroom in the home of
a writer mother and her teen-aged art-director daughter who is a recent graduate of
home-schooling.
Gingerbread House, based in Westhampton Beach, New York, consistently has been
sweeping reviewers off their feet and bagging prestigious awards. All four of Gingerbread
House’s original titles were named to the coveted “Children’s Book Sense
76,” (The Picks List) a compilation of recommendations from the American Booksellers
Association, two have won the International Reading Association/Children's Book Council's
"Children's Choices" award, and one has been honored with the most important
international citation for a trade book with educational application, from The Global
Learning Initiative, which is a partnership between the Association of Educational
Publishers and the Bologna Children's Book Fair. In addition to their being
recognized with other significant citations, all four titles have garnered dozens of rave
reviews from traditional trade and consumer publications.
The awards with which the four books have been honored are judged by experts in their
respective fields of literacy, education, publishing, design, and bookselling. Gingerbread
House’s four original books are:
IN
ENGLISH, OF COURSE, --illustrated by Russian immigrant to the USA, Dasha Ziborova--which School Library Journal says is done
with “sly humor, hilariously paced,”
THE
WEIGHT OF A MASS, A TALE OF FAITH, illustrated by Hungarian Katalin Szegedi, (named “Illustrator of the
Year” by the Hungarian Section of IBBY!), which Kirkus Reviews calls, “wholly
beautiful,” SHOW; DON’T TELL! SECRETS OF
WRITING, illustrated by the prolific Italian illustrator
Eva
Montanari, about which two reviews begin with the word, “Wow!”, and THE
NUMBERS DANCE, A COUNTING COMEDY, which does for numerals what Chicka-Chiccka-Boom-Boom
did for letters.
Josephine Nobisso, the author of over
two-dozen beloved books with various publishers, wrote the four winners, and her teen
daughter Maria Nicotra acted as their art
director. What's next for this little
press and its founders? Gingerbread House's project in progress is a lovely companion
volume to THE WEIGHT OF A MASS, A TALE OF FAITH,
titled
TAKE IT TO THE QUEEN, A TALE
OF HOPE, about the Blessed Mother as Intercessor. With Maureen Hyde, who
illustrated the 3 reprints in Gingerbread House's launch list, the press is working on
FRANCESCO WOKE UP EARLY, a lovely imagined moment from the boyhood of St. Francis of
Assisi. |
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