Booby Hatch

by Betsy Lewin

From "a little white egg in a circle of stones, on a tiny island, in a vast blue sea" hatches Pepe, a young blue-footed booby. With clear, simple text and bright watercolors, Betsy Lewin shows how Pepe learns to fly, dives for his dinner, and meets his mate, against the fascinating backdrop of his Galapagos Islands habitat. The accurate and vivid text is drawn from Ms. Lewin's observations at a booby nesting site on Hood Island.

Genres: Picture Books, Animals

32 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

Betsy Lewin grew up in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. She always loved to draw and can’t remember wanting to be anything but an artist. Her mother, a kindergarten teacher, is responsible for her love of children’s books. She read to Betsy and her brother every night: Winnie the Pooh, The Adventures of Babar, Uncle Remus, and all the fairy tale books. The illustrators A.B. Frost and Ernest Shepard were among her earliest heroes. Later on when she started illustrating for children, Betsy realized how strongly she’d been influenced by James Stevenson and Quentin Blake.

After graduating from Pratt Institute where she studied illustration, Betsy designed greeting cards. Then she began to write and illustrate stories for children’s magazines. When an editor at Dodd, Mead & Company asked her to expand one of those stories into a picture book, Betsy says, “I jumped at the chance. I’ve been doing picture books ever since and loving every moment.”

Betsy’s art is usually humorous, drawn in pen or brush with watercolor washes, as in Click, Clack, Moo; Cows That Type, but she also paints in a naturalistic style as in Pool. Gorilla Walk is her first collaboration with her husband Ted and is about their trek to see the mountain gorillas in Uganda. This was followed by five more collaborations; Elephant Quest, set in the Okavango Delta, Top To Bottom Down Under, about their adventures in Australia, Horse Song; A Story of the Naadam, set in Mongolia, Balarama; A Royal Elephant, set in India, and Patrol, about the puffins of Iceland.

Many of Betsy’s books have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List and she has garnered many awards including a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators, and a Caldecott Honor for Click, Clack, Moo; Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin.

When not at work on their books, Ted and Betsy love to travel to exotic places around the world gathering material for new books. At home each of them has a studio in their brownstone house in Brooklyn. Besides the usual clutter of pencils and pens, paint tubes and brushes, drawing paper and, of course, books, they surround themselves with mementos of their travels: peacock feathers from India, Herero dolls from Botswana, Galimoto toys from Namibia and Brazil, digeridoos from Australia, postcards and snapshots, and countless stones and seashells and bits of cloth that transport them back to the lands they visited. Their cat, Sophie, can usually be found napping on their drawing table.

Betsy was awarded a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators Original Art show for Click, Clack, Moo; Cows That Type, and an Honor for the first ever Ted Geisel Award given by the ALA for the book she illustrated, Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa.

In 2015, Ted and Betsy Lewin were inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

Reviews

[Cosette]

Inspirational illustrations

[Emma]

Absolutely charming! The little boobies have so much character!

[Kat Gregory]

A charming and educational picture book! It does feel more like an educational book than a story, but that's alright. The text isn't anything special, but the artwork is, and is full of personality and sure to delight any bird lover.

[Kari]

I'm partial to Lewin, and to beautiful nature illustrations. And we happen to love saying blue-footed booby.

[Dawn]

Cute story about the life of Blue-footed boobies in the Galápagos Islands. My children enjoyed this book a lot, when they were young. I know that we checked it out from the library multiple times.

[Jacoba]

I felt like I was back in the Galapagos reading this beautifully illustrated book.

[Amber]

A picture book about boobies!!!

Blue Footed Boobies!!!
One of my all time favorite birds!
It's a cute story, following Pepe the bird from hatching to fathering his own egg. Lots of other Galapagos animals make an appearance. A good book for teaching little ones about the magic of boobies.