For newly anointed Caldecott Medalist Cátia Chien, the past few days have been worthy of party sparklers and confetti cannons: her illustrations for the picture book Fireworks, written by Matthew Burgess and published by Clarion Books, earned the coveted prize at the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards on January 26.
A couple of days before the announcements, Chien was out with her young son and husband, near their home in the Bay Area. “My son wanted to go bowling, so we were in the bowling alley parking lot when I got the call,” Chien told PW. “I asked, ‘Wait, is this what I think it means?’ I think I asked that three times. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.”
Her family intuited that the ALA was on the line. “All three of us just hugged,” she said. “Bowling was put on pause right away,” and they found a restaurant where they could celebrate by ordering “barbecue and hot pot and all of that.” Her son, far from being disappointed in the change of plans, “was excited. He had told me, ‘You know, Mamãe, I always knew that you were a good mom, but I didn’t know that you were a famous artist.’ I do paint around him, but I don’t talk about what I do in terms of known or unknown. It’s interesting for him to put it in those words.” Once she’d received the happy news from ALA, Chien’s phone rang again. It was Clarion editorial director Kate O’Sullivan, with fervent congratulations. “After that, I called Matthew, who’d been texting with me to check in, and then I called my agent, Steve Malk,” of Writers House, Chien said. “Steve and I were both screaming on the phone. Matthew and I talked for a bit, and we are just sitting in the space of feeling really proud.”
Fireworks, the second of Burgess’s manuscripts to be illustrated by Chien, following 2020’s The Bear and the Moon (Chronicle), was acquired by Mabel Hsu. When Hsu left Harper’s Katherine Tegen Books for Sourcebooks’ Stonefruit Studio, she passed the baton to O’Sullivan, who took the project across the finish line.
An onomatopoeic ode to an awe-inspiring Fourth of July display in the New York City sky, Fireworks follows two siblings through a city park, through the classic N.Y.C. fire-hydrant spray (“Woohoo!”), and “up up up” a fire escape, to their Chinatown building’s “silver tar rooftop still soft from the day’s sun.” Chien’s images capture the liquifying heat and sizzling energy of an urban summer day from morning to night. While the artist paid homage to her youthful relationship with her sister and late grandmother in the illustrations, she said, the book doesn’t depict her own childhood. “I didn’t want it to be necessarily tied to my nostalgia. I wanted to capture this universal sense of the freedom within childhood, of growing up and having freedom to roam around.”
Reflecting on how she developed the melting daytime scenery and scintillating nighttime impressions for Fireworks, Chien said, “Matthew is generous in his storytelling because he allows for there to be completion with pictures.” As she read the narrative about a sweaty, dizzy day abuzz with ambient noise, “the idea of capturing something as ephemeral as a light, a sound, moved me to want to take on the project.”
Chien experimented with several media she hadn’t tried before, including scratchboard, to convey the sensation of explosive light and sound. “The creation of a book for me often starts at the art store, where I travel through the aisles,” she said. “I do it without any kind of plan—I just let certain colors or palettes move me as I’m walking through. It’s the thrill of, like, going to a cave and finding something at the other end” by collecting materials and hues.
At moments when the text makes noise—a “plip plop plip” of dripping watermelon wedges, a “shooka-shooka” of overheard salsa music from a shop, and the “zing,” “sh-sh-sh,” and “tizzle-ting” of firecrackers—Chien thought about how visuals imitate sound. “I knew that there would be a marriage between the sound and the pictures,” she said, “and the illustration would need to stand on its own, without the words attached.” Once the pictures were underway, illustrator Rilla Alexander (You Rule!) was brought in to create the display type, “and she and I worked together to figure out the composition with the letters,” Chien said.
Toward the end of Fireworks, the siblings await the show’s conclusion and the spread lifts upward into a square gatefold—an apt grand finale. When negotiating the specs for the book, Chien said, “one of the first things I asked for was the vertical gatefold, because of the nature of fireworks” and their ascent into the air. “I pushed hard for that gatefold, but we did have to take out a couple other things for that to happen—it seems like it was worth it.”
Chien thinks back on the past weeks with gratitude. She appreciates the Mock Caldecott and classroom competitions that raise the profiles of worthy picture books and introduce children’s creators to young audiences. “This is a book that’s being loved by readers, and that, in and of itself, was a celebration for me, whether or not it turned out that the Caldecott was on the other end,” Chien said. “I told Matthew, ‘We’re going to be brave and take all this in.’ I wanted to just be in the moment.”
