Emma Shevah

Book Birthday!!!

Posted on April 5, 2018

Yippppeeeeee! Today, a delightfully funny, very caring yet deeply confused child is born into the world, and her name is Lexie. Happy book birthday to me (and her). May her life be most excellent and may she be very very loved.

(Disclaimer: Lexie is not my a biological child or she would be child number seven, and seven children is beyond even my mothering capabilities. No, I have four children born of my flesh and blood, and three now born of my brain.)

Here are my girls. Don’t they look perdy?

Thanks to Chicken House and cover designer Helen Crawford-White, Amber and Dara have been rebranded so now they all have fabulous floating heads on the covers and look MORE GRAPHIC DESIGNY AND CLEAN-LINED, MORE POLISHED AND EYE-CATCHING, MORE PROFESSIONAL AND CONNECTED-TO-EACH-OTHER-IN-A-COOL-AND-GROOVY-WAY, MORE MMM MMM MMM and MORE GORGEOUS THAN I COULD HAVE THOUGHT POSSIBLE.

Quick focus on LEXIE: Lexie is about a ten year old girl from a Greek Cypriot family in London who is separated from her cousin after a BIG FAT FAMILY ARGUMENT and tells a HUGE LIE to try and stop them arguing. In a sentence, it’s about truth, lies and spinach/feta pies, friends being mean and car keys in the sea, and toilets in the garden and secrets in shoeboxes. In order for any of this to make sense, you have to read it.

Useful information:

• By clicking on the hyperlinks above, you can read the opening chapters of all three of the books.
• What Lexie Did will be published soon in the US and Canada by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, and will be called ‘LEXIE AND THE LIE’.
• Graphic designy is not a grammatically correct word.
• MMM MMM MMM needs to be hummed in the way a chicken-frying mamma in deepest Louisiana might hum it.

Useless information:

• According to the twitter site, Quite Interesting (@qikipedia), “a Tokyo restaurant has said a woman who ordered their world’s smallest sushi, made with a single grain of rice, was so moved she cried for an hour and a half.”
• And seeing as Lexie is Greek Cypriot, @qikipedia also tells us that “the word “ostrich” is derived from the Greek “struthos meagle” – literally “big sparrow”. (Photo: Sven-Kåre Evenseth.)”

You’re welcome.