WESLANDIA

This is the story of a boy named Wesley, who is an “outcast from the civilization around him,” and decides to use the knowledge he’s obtained during the school year to create his own civilization as a summer project. In creating this culture (which includes staple crop, clothes, sun dial, numeric system based on 8 numbers, games, language, etc.) he calls "Weslandia," Wesley draws attention from his classmates who once made fun of him, and eventually becomes their friend when he returns to school in the fall.

From delightful read-alouds to tongue-in-cheek novels for young adults, from historical nonfiction to contemporary verse, Paul Fleischman's books certainly constitute a rich and varied crop. The idea for A Fate Totally Worse Than Death , a hilarious spoof on horror novels, harks back to his own youth, when he used to keep copies of MAD MAGAZINE in his notebook to read during class. "As a teenager I loved humor that mocked the adult world," he says. "As an adult I realized there's very little young-adult humor that asks teenagers to laugh at themselves." In the nonfiction Dateline: Troy, the author retells Homer's epic poem The Iliad ingeniously juxtaposing each episode with newspaper clippings of modern events from the First World War through to the Gulf War to reveal astonishing parallels between the ancient world and our own. Paul Fleischman recalls growing up in a home filled with books and music, two early influences that continue to resonate. "After years alone on the piano bench," he says, "I finally learned to play the recorder, and fell in love with the camaraderie of chamber music. What joy!" His attempt to bring a similar kind of bliss to spoken quartets resulted in Big Talk: Poems for Four Voices, a book whose poems are meant to be read by multiple voices, creating a music and camaraderie of their own. Before he became a full-time writer, Paul Fleischman worked at a retirement home, a bagel bakery, a library, in bookstores, and as a proofreader. After sojourns in New Mexico, Vermont, and Nebraska, he settled down in his home state of California.

ILLUSTRATOR'S BIO

"My work is often described as offbeat or quirky," says illustrator Kevin Hawkes. "But I also have a love for traditional painting." Indeed, Kevin Hawkes is the rare artist whose work spans the gamut from vibrant, whimsical fantasy to rich, intricate realism with equally extraordinary results. "Much of my early childhood was spent traveling in the back of a white Rambler station wagon," recalls Kevin Hawkes, whose father was an officer in the Air Force. "We moved all the time. I was always the new kid, always a bit apart." Like the shipwrecked mariner in Robinson Crusoe, his favorite book, Kevin Hawkes as a boy spent many hours by himself, hiking, exploring, constructing forts and towers, and tracking animals. So when he first read the draft of Paul Fleischman's Weslandia, the story of a young nonconformist who creates his own backyard civilization, it spoke to him "immediately, on every level." Drawing on both boyhood memories and his own active imagination, Kevin Hawkes created a lush, mesmerizing environment for Weslandia that earned him the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal for "outstanding illustration in a children's book." When he's not hard at work in his studio, Kevin Hawkes likes to garden, read, ride his bike, go camping, or craft homemade Christmas gifts with his wife and four children. "Every year we try something different," he says--from making handmade glass beads to weaving, carpentry, stone-carving, and creating ceramics and mosaics. He lives with his family in Gorham, Maine.