Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Apt. 3 by Ezra Jack Keats

Hat tip to Nick Bruel (our other other brother from another nother mother) for today’s suggestion. He asked if we’d done any Ezra Jack Keats before and we said, “Sure! We did The Snow Day“. Then he asked if we’d done Apt. 3 and we had NOT! Plus, I recently highlighted on my blog the new Keats bio for adults, Becoming Ezra Jack Keats, so this seemed particularly apropos. In this episode we discuss how this book is like Only Murders in the Building, how, from a color-perspective, this book is quite muted compared to previous titles by Keats like Whistle for Willie, and why you should never follow someone when they ask, “What’s the matter – scared?”

Listen to the whole show here on Soundcloud or download it through iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, PlayerFM, or your preferred method of podcast selection.

Show Notes:

Again, a great big thank you to our listener and fan, Lorena, for this copy of the Australian picture book, Satin by Sophie Masson, ill. Lorena Carrington. Thank you, Lorena!!

And here, I am so pleased to show you, is the original 1971 Kirkus review of Apt. 3. It is, as is often the case with this publication, delightful.

Kate got quite intrigued, specifically, by the choice of mixed-media newspaper featured in the trash can here.

Not long enough ago, Kate and I helped move a bedbug-ridden mattress from an old apartment building. So you can understand our instinctive shrinking away from the mattress in this hallway image.

This is so strange. The text says that wild “colors from outside had come into the room and were floating around,” but you get none of that from the images. It feels like a poor melding of text and image, yet what’s so strange is that the author and illustrator are one and the same. As Kate points out, it would have made sense for the colors to have been muted in this book only up to the end. That would have been the bolder choice.

Kate Recommends: Renfield

Betsy Recommends: Her upcoming talk on the podcast Open to Debate.

Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate