More About the Author
DIANA CAIN BLUTHENTHAL, author and illustrator of numerous children's picture books and early-reader chapter books, says she still gets "thrill bumps" when she encounters one of her books in public. "I still feel a rush of excitement that jump-starts my heart, just like I felt 16 years ago the first time it happened to me...."
Ms. Bluthenthal has helped to create 16 books for children, to date. Her artwork has been paired with some of the pillar authors in children's publishing. She has received countless praises for her playful use of color, and her ability to capture body language and mood with a mere, single stroke of line, or "dot" of an eye..... "That's what I enjoy most," she says. "I love to draw... to me, it feels like music, or dancing. I love the way lines flow and intersect on the page, and the shapes created in the space between them. I love the challenge of distilling down a scene, a character, a page of text, to it's essence, to tell a story...." She also describes her love of imparting some kind of "new" information, not included in the text, but that acts as a visual "window" that tells the reader more about the character and their challenge.
"If they don't already have one, I like to give a character a pet," she explains, as one of her favorite additions to a story. "One suited to their personality, and their dilemma.... And every author I've worked with, upon seeing it, has welcomed this."
As written about her in RIF's 40th anniversary book, "The Art of Reading," Ms. Bluthenthal tells of how she desperately yearned as a child to have a pet of her own, but never was she allowed one. "That's likely one of the core memories of my growing up years," she concludes with a chuckle, "so perhaps I am subconsciously 'righting the wrong' through the characters in my books."
A good example can be found in Charlotte Zolotow's, "A Tiger Called Thomas," where Ms. Bluthenthal chose to give little Thomas a pet, a singular goldfish, unmentioned in the text. Thomas is a very shy boy, moving to a new house, on a new street, and feels terribly unsure of himself. "As I was developing his character for the book, it came to me that a good way to communicate his feelings about his predicament might be to give him a little fish, swimming in a big, round bowl. The smallness of them both in their worlds, the separation of the glass between them, their kindred aloneness...." Thomas is seen, in the opening pages, gingerly and securely transporting his pet to his new home. A tag dangles on the fish bowl that reads, "Fragile." Just exactly the word for Thomas at that moment.
It's her contributions like those that place a finger on the heart of the story, and draw in children.
"Matilda the Moocher" and "I'm Not Invited?" ...two books authored by Ms. Bluthenthal, on the other hand turn and speak directly to certain awkward and uncomfortable emotions such as feeling "used," or feeling "left out."
Her words, though, like her art, paint the tale by drawing quiet correlations between events on the outside, and emotions on the inside of her character's lives and problems. Ms. Bluthenthal doesn't seek to solve these social problems children face, nor does she give her own characters a ticket to sidestep discomfort and rescue them from reality in her books. She uses storytelling as a means to invite, to open a quiet discussion, between a parent and child, a teacher and students, that can help air and alleviate these types of undermining and unproductive feelings that no one escapes in life.
When asked what is most meaningful about her career in children's book publishing, Ms. Bluthenthal replies, "It's the times when I'm out and about, tending to my own business, and I happen, by chance, to come upon someone sitting together with a child or children, and they are reading one of my books. In a bookstore, a daycare, a library, at storytime in school, or Sunday school.... When I get lucky enough to witness this like a fly on the wall (and they have no idea it's "me" standing there, eavesdropping, ...*laugh*), it's just like standing on the top of the world." #
