In Journey, Aaron Becker’s wordless debut picture book, a lonely girl embarks on a voyage of adventure and danger after going through a magic door she draws on her bedroom wall. The author followed up that 2014 Caldecott Honor Book with Quest, and now brings the girl’s enchanted excursion to a close in Return (Candlewick, Aug.), which he is eager to introduce to booksellers at BEA. Becker, who has worked as an artist on animated children’s films for several studios, including Lucasfilms, Disney, and Pixar, had long aspired to write a children’s book. “That had been my goal since I was in my 20s, in the late 1990s,” he recalls. “I was so excited about having Journey published that I didn’t think about doing another book for quite some time. I thought maybe I was done.” But Becker had a change of heart after receiving Caldecott Honor recognition: “It was icing on the cake, and it made me excited to tell more stories. I put a lot of pressure on myself to create Journey, and this award was like someone saying, ‘What you’re doing is worthwhile.’ It legitimized something that is very private, and made it easier to move on to Quest.”
Becker explains that he didn’t initially conceive of his inaugural book as wordless. “I started with a vision of a girl in a boat entering a walled island castle, and from there etched out a story in thumbnail form,” he says. “When I went to add words, I realized that there was no need for them, which surprised me. Though it wasn’t premeditated, this was obviously a format that comes naturally to me, perhaps because of my film background. The idea of storyboards and storytelling through frames seemed very normal.”
The author’s own real-life journeys—he has lived in rural Japan and East Africa, and has backpacked through South Pacific islands and Sweden—have fueled his creative vision. As a boy of 10, he visited the walled island of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, which many years later inspired the imposing castle that appears throughout the Journey trilogy. “Though Mont Saint-Michel gave me a visual starting point,” he says, “I expanded the castle, and the rest of the books’ world, outward to include other things that inspire me—like buildings in Florence and other parts of northern Europe, and the architecture of Asia and the Middle East.”
More recently, the author, who lives in Massachusetts, and his family journeyed to Spain while he finished his watercolors for Return, and worked with filmmakers on a documentary about his creation of that book. Currently, the author is juggling several potential children’s book projects. “One is a wordless picture book, some involve writing, and some involve a lot of writing,” he notes. “One result of the Caldecott Honor is that it gives me the luxury, as a book creator, to play with different ideas, without feeling pressure. That’s a good spot to be in, and I’m taking full advantage of it.”
Fans of his fantasy trilogy can meet Becker today, 1:30–2:30 p.m., when he autographs lithos from Return at a ticketed signing at Table 6.
This article appeared in the May 12, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
