Gingerbread House Keeps Wowing Reviewers and Scooping Up Awards
It isn’t every start-up children’s book publisher that can boast 27 important international awards and citations for its original titles, but it’s even more astonishing when the list is comprised of only six original titles (four others are reprints of the author's books with major houses), and the press is run from a gambrel cottage
in the yard of a writer mother and her art-director daughter who is a graduate of home-schooling. Besides being distinguished by the awards listed below, all of Gingerbread House's beautiful books have been used as set dressings in five major motion pictures--"Friends with Kids," with John Hamm and Megan Fox, "Two Days in New York," starring Chris Rock and Julie Delpy, "The Switch," featuring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, "The Other Woman," with Natalie Portman, and "Motherhood," starring Uma Thurman and Mini Driver. With the American fine artist, Maureen Hyde, who illustrated the three reprints on Gingerbread House's launch list, the press has just released FRANCIS WOKE UP EARLY--yet another book about the popular and even "secular" St. Francis of Assisi, yes, but the first book to imagine a moment from the boyhood of the saint. In the many years since Maureen painted the other three titles, she has dedicated herself to teaching classical painting techniques to American art students, at The Florence Academy of Art, in Italy. All the while, she seriously advanced her own craft, reviving authentic Old Master techniques that inform her stunning oil paintings. FRANCIS WOKE UP EARLY has already received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and a Moonbeam Gold Award for the best book in its category. We think you’ll be enchanted--and perhaps even astounded--by the extraordinary paintings the artist created over a period of two decades, working on this little masterpiece in the annals of children's literature.
