Goldfish Ghost: New Snicket/Brown picture book for 2017

[Dante]

To reiterate the title, Lemony Snicket will be writing and Lisa Brown illustrating a new picture book, Goldfish Ghost, which is slated to come out in spring 2017. You will notice that that is more than a year away; hence, we know very little about it:
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Neal Porter of Roaring Brook's Neal Porter Books has acquired Lemony Snicket's picture book, Goldfish Ghost, about a diminutive ghost finding his place in an all too solid world. Lisa Brown will illustrate. Publication has been set for spring 2017; Daniel Handler represented Mr. Snicket; Charlotte Sheedy of Charlotte Sheedy Literary represented Handler and Brown in the deal for world rights, excluding the U.K.
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Publishers Weekly - Rights Report: Week of February 8, 2016

Note that Handler spoke exactly a year ago about writing a new, then-untitled picture book: "I’m working on a book with my wife (illustrator Lisa Brown). [...] It’s a picture book, and it means she has to do more of the work than I do — which is the kind of collaboration I’m totally comfortable with." (Source)

[Cafe SalMONAlla]

Pumped.

[Skelly Craig]

I'm sure it'll be on the level of his other picture books, but it's true that the illustrations seem to be more in focus than the writing. Lisa Brown is okay, maybe slightly above average as an illustrator, but not more, so I'm kind of ambivalent to their collabs. (She kind of has a Seth thing going, but without the good design imo.)

[bear]

i like the watercolor/hand-painted look of lisa brown's art in Swinster Pharmacy. i thought that worked a lot better with her art style than the boring solid color digital feel of her art in The Latke, etc. i still don't think her style works very well with snicket narration (jon klassen is the best of that i've seen) but it's still possible that this will look kind of neat.

the weird part is that this sounds like a really cutesy, standard picture book plot. every other picture book daniel handler's written has at least had a bit of a dark or oddball theme.

[Cafe SalMONAlla]

I wasn't particularly interested by her Latke illustrations, though the style worked for the amusingly textbook-like diagram about how latkes are cooked. Ditto for the textbookish theme of Pope. The 29MOTSP style was beautiful, as are many of the 'daily sketches' she posts on social media.

I won't be surprised if a book about a ghost ends up having a dark or oddball theme.

Thankfully, there's no "the" at the beginning of the title, so we can distinguish between our abbreviations for this and for book the eleventh.

[Dante]

I swear that The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming is at least partly a joke book. There was a Handler interview years ago where he talked about him and his wife laughing as she drew a bunch of essentially identical pictures for that book.

Feb 10, 2016 21:58:52 GMT -5 bear said:

the weird part is that this sounds like a really cutesy, standard picture book plot. every other picture book daniel handler's written has at least had a bit of a dark or oddball theme.

Strangely enough, this was exactly my first impression, too, though it's true that it's quite an unreasonable first impression; we really have no idea what to expect, and it could be plenty oddball enough.

[Orangey Snicket]

I'm no artist and just look at pictures and go, "yeah, that looks good." Regardless, I hope this book will be funny in some way.