Make sure you turn up the volume on your computer before you watch the book trailer for Dev Petty and Mike Boldt's I Don't Want to Be Big. You're going to have the awesome song featured in the book trailer stuck in your head for the REST of the week.
Thank you, Dev, for taking over my blog for the day.
As kids are wont to
do, they sometimes (by luck or by design) point out things you don't really
want pointed out as a parent. Sometimes
they say something that stops you dead in your tracks and makes you think.
It was just one of
these moments that led me to write I Don't Want to be Big, my followup to I
Don't Want to be a Frog. And this moment
happened right when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write a
followup about. I considered the obvious
(if you haven't read the book, this won't make sense to you but trust me. it's
hi-larious)- I Don't Want to be a Badger.
But since I really like Badgers, this seemed somewhat disingenuous. What's more, badgers are pretty mean and I'd
rather not make another enemy in the animal world- sorry again cuttlefish! So there I was, trying to figure out what to
write about and I found myself at dinner imploring my daughter to eat her food
so she would grow big and tall (that's in the parent manual I sometimes forget
to put away).
Now here's the
thing. She's on the small side, but is a
perfectly healthy height and weight- her lovely doctor says so- she's just
small. Her great grandmother didn't
crack five feet and she lived to be 106, so the small genes seem to pay off in
our family. Anyhoo, she looked at me and
said “I don't want to grow big.” Naturally, I asked “Why?” And she answered, “I
like being small.”
Huh.
Now, I shouldn't be
surprised. This is the same kid who once
posited that we humans were not, in fact, real but just toys being played with
by a giant and we were just too wrapped up in ourselves to notice. But I digress...She likes how she is. And while she knows she will inevitably grow,
she didn't see any real reason to eat food she didn't want simply for that
purpose. I probed further about
this...She said she liked being able to fit in small places and be carried
around and she was good at surprising people.
She is, seriously good, which can be a real problem when you're cooking
dinner. They were all pretty swell
points when I stopped to think about it.
I wanted to write a
book for her- for the kid who's happy how she is and who's a little skeptical
about the strings attached to growing big...Ipso Facto...I will have to get an
apartment and a job if I'm over four feet.
So there I was with a
I Don't Want to {insert thing here}- that felt pretty good. The only trouble was that I had no idea how
to write a followup to a book I probably didn't really know how to write in the
first place. Should I try to figure out
what people liked about Frog and copy it exactly? Should I be totally different or totally
referential? My analytical side had me
sketching diagrams about what was good and what wasn't- trying to sort of
backwards engineering things.
Leave it to my kids,
again, to make sense of things. “Just
make kids laugh,” they suggested. Make
kids laugh, eh? Well, I'd read Frog SIX
BILLION TIMES and had a good sense of the moments that kids found funny and
those other moments I thought were hilarious and they smiled politely. I had answered dozens of questions about the
book from kids who wanted me to talk about certain parts or certain
characters. So I decided that the best
guide for writing this book was those kids, my kids, kids.
I wrote my little
followup. I tried to write things that
honored my kid and her individuality (also her semi-occasional smartypantsness)
and the kids who like to laugh and don't always do exactly what their parents
expect. I Don't Want to be Big will be
out in a little while- on October 11th, to be exact. The unbelievably talented and charming Mike
Boldt illustrated it beautifully again- with characters that pop off the page
in a simple but bright way. There was a
lot of me in my debut book I Don't Want to be a Frog, about finding the good
part of things you don't really like about yourself. I Don't Want to be Big is then, about other
people finding the good part in the things you DO like about yourself even if
they run counter to expectations. We're
all going to grow, one way or the other...up or side to side...we might grow
restless or grow roots...but I'm pretty sure however small she is, she's going
to grow, even if she doesn't eat that last piece of broccoli.
Dev
Petty writes the words for picture books.
She
used to be a painter in movies- like in the Matrix films and others...But now
she's only artistic enough to be dangerous.
And
telling stories is so much fun. She happens to like the kind that make you
laugh a little and think a little.
Dev
lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's great at word jumbles, sandwich
making, and finishing thi--
She
is the author of I Don't Want to be Big, Claymates (Little Brown 2017), There's
Nothing to Do (Doubleday 2017) and her debut book, I Don't Want to be a
Frog.
Look for I Don't Want to Be Big on October 11, 2016.