October 2014 Debut of the Month Children's imaginations will run wild after reading this delightfully spooky story. Katie May Green is a stunning new talent in the world of picture books. It is an evocative and magical book filled with free-spirited joy and unforgettable images.
Edward Gorey meets Downton Abbey in a deliciously ghostly caper about mischievous children who won't stay inside their gilded portrait frames.
Welcome to Shiverhawk Hall! It's a big old house full of treasure, mystery, and stories. Here, just look up on the wall. See these beautiful paintings? These are children who used to live here long ago: the DeVillechild twins, the Pinksweet tots . . . my, they look like such good children. So very well behaved. But wait a minute, did you see that? One of their eyes seemed to blink! Did you hear that? A rustle! A whisper! The tiniest scratch! Can it be that when darkness falls, the children on the walls at Shiverhawk Hall climb out of their paintings and run amok?
Katie May Green is a graduate from the Cambridge School of Art MA in Children's Book Illustration. She has created artwork for UK and US publishers including HarperCollins, Penguin and Oxford University Press.
Seen and Not Heard is Katie's first picture book. She says, of the inspiration behind it, I remember standing in front of an Elizabethan portrait of three children, wondering what these stiffly-clad, sombre-looking little people were really like. Were they, in their time, so very different from children today? My thoughts then became a little more abstract: what would it feel like to be trapped in a painting for four hundred years? Would there be any kind of release? Perhaps, with a little moonlight, a little magic...
