Candlewick Press | 978-1536217834
At their best, picture books are the interplay of text, illustrations, and design, a marriage of the visual and the verbal – together, more than the sum of each of their parts. It’s a form that invites readers to inhabit the world of the book in such a way that, once the reader/listener has finished the book, they’ll want to pick it up and read it again.
NAMASTE IS A GREETING by Suma Subramaniam, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat is such a book. The words, like a list poem, provide the structure, while the art is free to build on that structure, imagining a narrative about all the ways namaste can be both a greeting and a way of living in community with others.
Derived from Sanskrit, namaste is a respectful greeting, its meaning having evolved over time and across cultures. As such, you can imagine that people have different opinions about how namaste should be represented in a book.
CLICK TO ENLARGE © Words by Suma Subramaniam, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat
For that reason, I was glad to have the opportunity to read and hear what the creators of NAMASTE IS A GREETING had to say about their understanding of namaste based on their personal experience and heritage, and their intentional representation of that understanding in the text and art of the book.
You can learn more about the collaboration of author Suma Subramaniam and illustrator Sandhya Prabhat as they worked with their editor and the Candlewick publishing team to capture their personal relationship to the word and concept of namaste.
- TeachingBooks Virtual Book Tour (Scroll down to listen to the author and illustrator discussing the process of woking on NAMASTE IS A GREETING)
- Conversation with the author and illustrator on Cynsations
- Behind the scenes peek at the development of the art from sketches, through character design, to mock-ups of cover ideas.
