This page is about my own two children's picture books that I have been fortunate to have had published. I have always done my artwork under my nickname Kari, but I use my full name for my picture books: Karin Cates.
[Scroll down for brief summaries of each book]
The Secret Remedy Book, by Karin Cates
Illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin
Published by Orchard Books, An Imprint of Scholastic Inc.
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A Far-Fetched Story, by Karin Cates
Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter
Published by Greenwillow Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Summaries:
Lolly goes to visit her favorite Auntie Zep, but when her family drives away, to her great surprise, Lolly suddenly feels sad. Auntie Zep knows just what to do. They go up to the attic and find the very old trunk that has “both a watery smell like the ocean and a sun-dried smell like the desert.” And in the trunk is a very old book in which remedies are written “in a spidery handwriting that seemed to scurry and scuttle across each page.” There are seven remedies but there is also a warning that says that all of them must be completed before the first hoot of an owl or none of them will work! Lolly and Auntie Zep hurry to finish all seven remedies before the owl hoots. They must drink apple juice, plant a seed, take a walk, feed a wild thing, and three more things after that. The book ends with Lolly in bed all cozy and comfy and dreamy. Then she and Auntie Zep hear the “soft, trembling hoot of an owl in the darkness outside the window.” But Lolly is no longer sad ~ she is very busy dreaming of tomorrow.
A long hard winter is coming and Grandmother wants just one more armful of firewood for her woodbox. One by one, the boy, the girl, the mother, the father, and even the baby are sent off in search of firewood, but each one returns without one stick and with a far-fetched story to explain why their favorite piece of clothing is now in shreds. Grandmother tosses all the raggedy clothing into the woodbox, and, against her family’s protests, she says she will have to burn all the remnants of their favorite clothing for firewood. But the minute she picks up one of the rags and holds it against her cheek, “it felt as comforting as a kiss.” Suddenly, she thinks of a way that the rags can make a different kind of warmth without burning them, and she keeps her family warm through the long hard winter, which comes just as she said it would.
[Click on photos of books above to enlarge the covers for viewing]
