With the addition of Penny, Kevin Henkes extends the mouse "family" of characters that includes Lilly, Wemberly, Chrysanthemum and Julius in his picture books. Henkes read the first Penny book to editor Virginia Duncan over the phone, and then finished the next two books "in quick succession," she said. Once the manuscript was ready, Henkes sent in a dummy with rough sketches.
Then comes the major difference between working on a novel with Henkes and working on a picture book. "There's a lot of fine-tuning in the dummy stage," Duncan said. "Moving one word or one line to another page, which is so much fun and so rewarding--that doesn't happen with a novel as much." A Good Day is her favorite of Henkes's picture books. "It's everything you need to know to live a happy life," she said. "It's a complex topic reduced to its essence, and he has the ability to do that."
For every book, Henkes works closely with his art director Paul Zakris and the production department and makes sure the paper is right and the colors are printing the way he wants them. "All of those choices are with the reader in mind," Duncan said. "He made those decisions about Penny, too. There are no full-bleed pictures. All of them are boxed or in vignettes. That's a result of Kevin studying that format and deciding what he felt worked the best."
The team at Greenwillow knows Kevin Henkes and his work so well, after three decades, that they are "like an extension of his family, in a way," Duncan said. They know what he likes and what he doesn't like. "The conversations we have and the decisions we make are very specific. We know he doesn't like certain typefaces, for example--that saves time, and it makes what we do talk about very interesting. At least I think so!"
For Penny, they tried a variety of trim sizes, and the one they chose is not the standard beginning reader trim. Duncan explained: "Everything is carefully planned out: where the folio is placed, where the words are on the page, how much space is between the picture and the first line of the text." The same is true of how Henkes developed the series. Each book is a bit longer than the one before. The first has two chapters, the second book has three, and there are four chapters in the third book. "We're having a composer write Penny's song because we're doing an audio version," Duncan said. "Kevin and I talked about it, and we wanted a tune."
Of course, Henkes's readers have also embraced his characters as part of their households. "You get onto the elevator with Kevin at IRA or another conference," Duncan said, "and someone sees his name tag, and they start quoting from Jessica or tell him they've named their child Lilly. It's amazing."