Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Sophie’s Masterpiece by Eileen Spinelli, ill. Jane Dyer

It’s not quite October yet, so I didn’t want to start handing Kate the scary stuff immediately. This 25-year-old spider tale collaboration of Spinelli/Dyer seemed like a good intro to the season instead. It features a creature associated with the fall and that appears in a story that’s anything but scary. Unless you can’t take any tale about spiders, that is. Then you might be up a tree. This is our second Eileen Spinelli (we did Somebody Loves You Mr. Hatch in 2022 for Valentine’s Day). But Jane Dyer? This is the first book of hers we’ve done on this podcast. We compare this title to fellow spider book The Spider and the Fly, talk about how strange this boarding house may be if you always have to check your slippers for spiders, and discuss how non-judgemental the book is about the book’s single mom situation.

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

Show Notes:

In case you missed it, my book Terrible Terrible Birds: The (Mostly) True Story of Two Featherbrained Falcons Who Learned from Their Mistakes is out February 23, 2027, and is available for pre-order now. Just sayin’.

One look at this cover and you can’t blame Kate for wondering what the ratio of left shoes to right shoes is, precisely.

Here’s the Eileen Spinelli’s website, which I was so impressed with.

Can you forgive us for thinking this was a tale about a French spider?

This was quite the artistic choice on the part of Jane Dyer. The cartoonish quality of this image is completely at odds with the rest of this book. As I point out, until this moment, everything in this book has been very delicate. This image upends that delicacy entirely, and one can’t help but wonder about the thought process behind it.

We like Sophie’s shadow on the stairs as she makes her way up.

We’re going to give Jane Dyer some extra points here for accurate knitting needle representation in a picture book (see my previous posts on the Scourge of Upside Down Knitting Needles for a better understanding of why I get so hot under the collar about this).

We’re always suckers for details so the fact that Sophie’s hair is now beautifully braided over the top of her head and that her walking stick is a bobby pin, that’s all great stuff.

Imagine trying to paint lace with watercolors. Dyer, that can’t have been easy.

Here’s the additional information about Myles Pinkney that we reference.

Kate Recommends: The film Coraline

Betsy Recommends: The Invite on Apple TV

Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate