Five Spring Fairies: Joan Holub and Kathy Couri

Just as flowers need seeds, earth, sun, and spring showers to grow, Five Spring Fairies is a book that needed an author, editor, and illustrator to see it truly bloom. I wrote the story--sowing the seeds in the earth--as a board book originally titled Five Fairy Babies. It's a countdown from five to one (with flaps and pop-ups), in which we see flowers eventually bloom:

Five spring fairies crown a queen.
One goes to make the leaves turn green.

Four spring fairies playing ball.
One goes to tell the rain to fall.

When I submitted it as a manuscript to Erin Molta at Little Simon, she showered it with her savvy marketing expertise--adding the word "spring" to let readers know immediately that it was about spring flowers as well as fairies. She also thought it would make a great pop-up book because we'd be able to see the fairies and flowers bloom.

She brought Kathy Couri on board as the artist, and her illustrations really shine. I'd first seen her work in The Night Before Easter, and I've adored her ever since.

We'll be giving a copy of this book away in our new weekly feature, Wednesday's Win, sometime in April.

Five Spring Fairies, 2008
Little Simon, publisher
Joan Holub, author
Kathy Couri, illustrator