When I met Eva, who had come from England to visit her grandmother, her father told me a story about giving her his phone number at the airport to put in her shoe…just in case they got separated in the crowded terminal. But Eva had insisted that she didn’t need it. She had done a drawing of her parents and was confident that she could show it to a grown-up and they would be able to find them.  When I saw the picture Eva planned to use, I couldn’t stop smiling. It was the thought of a little girl who swings into action when her parent goes ‘missing’ that gave me the idea for Where Is Mommy? Using part of that actually drawing was the icing on the cake…and Eva became a published artist at only five years old. 

Throughout the story, the girl follows clues to figure out where her Mom might be. This was the orginal line drawing for the spread in which the little girl decides she'll make a ‘missing' poster of her Mom.

Sadly, the penguin never made it through the revisions. The art was created with watercolor, pastel, color pencil and then finished in photoshop to add Eva’s actual drawing of her Mom.

Where is Mommy? Is a leveled reader…so the vocabulary needed to be easily accessible to young readers. I might have had Mom tear out a recipe for lasagna, but kale was easier to read.