Thanks for having me at Kid Lit Frenzy, Alyson! I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but you and your website have long been one some of the best resources for children’s book fans everywhere - from educators, to families, to booksellers, to authors and illustrators. Thank you for all you do to support children and the kid lit community. I hope you and all of your readers are staying healthy.
So where did Where Is Our Library?: A Story of Patience & Fortitude start? Well, it’s the sequel to 2018’s Lost in the Library (also A Story of Patience & Fortitude), which follows the two world-renowned marble lion statues that sit outside the New York Public Library’s Schwarzman building on 5th Avenue.
Quick review (with spoilers): In Lost in the Library, Patience goes missing (he’s lost in the library). Fortitude ventures into the library for the first time and searches through all the historic rooms until he finally finds Patience in the Children’s Center while reading all of their favorite books.
But why another adventure? And why this particular one?
The answer is … because of back matter.
As fans of Kid Lit Frenzy surely know, back matter is a section at the end of some picture books (often nonfiction) that may illuminate certain topics in more depth, share additional resources, and so on (Alyson, I’m sure you have a better definition of backmatter up your sleeve. - Thanks Josh, I am actually working on a special post about backmatter, but what I will say is that it is often the part of the book that people skip but may contain some of the most important information of the whole book that you don’t want to miss.).
Because Lost in the Library takes place in a real building, I was asked to write a few bullet points of back matter. My facts were checked by folks at the New York Public Library and some of the points were edited, including one very big one below. I wrote the first sentence, but when I saw the final version of the book, another was added.
The Children’s Center would be moving? In 2020?! Just two years after the book’s release?! But that’s where Fortitude finds Patience?! That (sort of) ruins the plot of the book! (thanks for pointing that out in your review, Kirkus … *eyeroll*)
But like any author worth their salt, I realized (six months later) that this problem could be the conflict of their next adventure...
In Where Is Our Library? Patience and Fortitude visit the children’s section one night only to find … the books are ALL GONE! And rather than searching through the library to find them, they search through ALL OF MANHATTAN, stopping at literary locales all along the way. They visit all over the island from Broadway shows featuring children’s books (of which there are MANY!) to statues of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park to many of my favorite NYC picture book settings (in books like Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, And Tango Makes Three, Henry and the Kite Dragon, The Curious Garden, and more) to many of the nearly 100 NYPL branches.
Where Is Our Library? is an ode to both New York City and the picture books that take place there. I hope you enjoy taking a tour of the city through the eyes of a pair of marble lion statues in search of their beloved books. And without further further ado, here is the cover:
And because the whole jacket looks so gorgeous, here’s that, too:
Where Is Our Library?: A Story of Patience & Fortitude is illustrated (gorgeously, once again) by Stevie Lewis, published by Henry Holt/Macmillan in conjunction with the New York Public Library, and will be available at bookshops and libraries everywhere on October 27th, 2020.
Josh Funk is a software engineer and the author of books like the Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast series, the It's Not a Fairy Tale series, the How to Code with Pearl and Pascal series, the A Story of Patience & Fortitude series, Dear Dragon, Pirasaurs!, Albie Newton, and more. For more information about Josh Funk, visit him at joshfunkbooks.com and on Twitter at @joshfunkbooks.
Stevie Lewis illustrates children's books, including Lost in the Library, Sun! One in a Billion, and Moon! Earth's Best Friend. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and can be found at chocosweete.com and @chocosweete on Instagram.