CarrieAnne
Author & Illustrator
HomeButterfly, Butterfly
Follow the butterflies on this colorful, counting adventure. Discover a variety of flowers and butterflies as you count your way from one to ten. Every turn of the pages will reveal beautiful watercolor illustrations of North American butterflies and flowers.
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CarrieAnne’s colorful debut children’s picture book introduces kids to different types of butterflies and the fascinating worlds through which they fly. With fun rhyming throughout, CarrieAnn establishes the kind of repeating, question-response structure that’s ideal for storytime with younger readers. One page will depict a “butterfly, butterfly in the sky,” with text inquiring what it sees; the next page offers a rhyming answer (“eight orange flowers and a rubber ducky”) illustrated by the author’s inviting and detailed watercolor paintings. To further engage children’s attention, the answer rhymes count upwards, one to ten, starting with a butterfly seeing “one red flower and a bumblebee” and increasing eventually to “ten blue flowers as happy as can be.” The butterflies, true to their nature, flit and flow across the page layouts.
Seamlessly combining charming yet realistic artwork, cute rhymes, and educational content, CarrieAnne has created a picture book that kids will want to read over and over. The book stays fresh despite its repeating structure: It asks the same question ten times, but to a succession of new, vividly rendered butterflies, who each offer an answer that’s alive with color and surprises. The final pages identify each of the butterflies (black swallowtail, great spangled fritillary) and flowers (purple snowpea, blue forget-me-not) depicted in the book, plus offer colorful count-along pages in which butterflies appear in rows correlating with the pages they upon which they first appeared.
As a children’s librarian, CarrieAnne understands how to grab and hold children’s attention at reading time. This work of love smartly offers repeating but not boring rhymes, eye-catching watercolors, a variety of vibrant natural subjects, and the additional fun of counting.
Takeaway: Young readers will adore learning about butterflies and counting with this watercolor picture book.
Great for fans of: Dianna Hutts Aston’s A Butterfly is Patient, Jerry Pallotta’s Butterfly Colors and Counting, Susan R. Stoltz’s Let’s Count Butterflies.
A Natural Alphabet ISBN: 9798218366278 (hardcover) Coming soon
ISBN: (paperback) Coming soon
Learn the alphabet the natural way. In this unique and colorful book with letters big enough to trace. Beautiful watercolor illustrations bring the ABC's to life with the natural wonder of the world. Each letter word is illuminated with an acrostic poem.
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Barnes & Noble
Amazon
IndieBound Your local Independent Bookstore
CarrieAnne's Online Store
Brown Dog ISBN: 9798218380236 (hardcover) Out June 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798218385927 (paperback) Out Dec 1, 2024
Can a dog have a favorite season? Brown Dog has two he enjoys for the same reason. He loves to be warm! Journey through the seasons with Brown Dog in the rain, wind, sun and snow. Unique watercolor illustrations bring Brown Dog to life with a pop or color!
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This delightful picture book from librarian/author CarrieAnne (A Natural Alphabet) tells the story of a sweet brown dog who loves nothing more than a good nap on the picnic table, toasting his tummy in the sun. But summer fades, and Brown Dog must also tolerate those less desirable seasons where the wind is cold, the ground is hard (or squishy and wet), and his owners make him brave the elements for those all-important trips outside to potty. Brown Dog's only consolation during those months is a snooze in front of a cozy fire, curled up like a donut. And soon enough, the sun returns, the air is warm, the wind is gentle, and his beloved spot awaits.
As both author and illustrator, CarrieAnne has created a simple, stirring book for small children that charms with its wistful sense of simple pleasures and seasonal changes while inviting new readers with spare, crisp prose and art bursting with canine character. The illustrations, too, tend toward a warm minimalism, the black and white line drawings accented by wonderful bursts of color and capturing well-observed eccentricities of dog movement and behavior. Brown Dog is so lifelike that it’s no surprise that the book is dedicated to the memory of the author's own brown dog, Mr. Buttons, whose photo, like the illustrations, inspire that surge of companionable pleasure that comes with saying “good boy” to a favorite furry companion. The storytelling, meanwhile, encourages empathy for pets in the face of inclement weather, while gently demystifying the cycles of seasons.
Brown Dog is a lovely, gentle offering for young readers and the grown ups lucky enough to read to them, demonstrating that joy is infectious across species. It's a quiet book for quiet moments spent sharing a story and a cuddle, maybe with the family dog curled up close by.
Takeaway: Warm, wonderfully observed story of a dog experiencing the seasons.
Comparable Titles: Luca Tortolini’s My Dog and I, Paul Meisel’s My Happy Year by E. Bluebird.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
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