Peach and Blue

Illustrated in full color. He is a blue-bellied toad hopping aimlessly through life.  She is a sad peach yearning for escape and adventure.  Then one remarkable day, Peach and Blue explore the pond that Blue calls home and awaken each other to a world neither has ever really seen before.  Lush illustrations by the award-winning illustrating team of The Salamander Room and The Frog Prince, Continued perfectly complement this unique and graceful story.

A frog helps a peach see the world and the peach shows the frog sights he has never seen before.

Illustrated in full color. He is a blue-bellied toad hopping aimlessly through life.  She is a sad peach yearning for escape and adventure.  Then one remarkable day, Peach and Blue explore the pond that Blue calls home and awaken each other to a world neither has ever really seen before.  Lush illustrations by the award-winning illustrating team of The Salamander Room and The Frog Prince, Continued perfectly complement this unique and graceful story.


From the Hardcover edition.

There couldn't be a simpler, more straightforward, or more touching love story than this encounter between a blue-bellied toad and an almost ripe peach who yearns to see the world before she's "picked and made into a cobbler or a tart." Blue isn't exactly sure what tarts and cobblers are but shudders sympathetically anyway and comes up with a plan-an elaborate variation on leapfrog-to liberate his new friend. His kindness is more than repaid when, with her rapturous appreciation of the world he takes for granted, she opens his eyes to the beauty around him. Aware of her fragility, he extends every tenderness, for however much "forever" is left to them. Children understand implicitly that love is a tangible act and no mere abstraction; this story, with its subtle and evocative illustrations, will enhance that intuition. Family Fun Magazine

Steve Johnson was born in White Bear Lake, Minnesota and earned a B.F.A. in illustration from the School of Associated Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota. Steve's stunning illustrations have been seen in many magazines, but it was not until Knopf asked him to illustrate No Star Nights in 1989 that he began his career as a children's book illustrator. Since then, Steve and his wife Lou Fancher has collaborated on the illustrations and design on a number of notable children's books.  They are currently among the most sought after of children's book artists. Steve and Lou fell in love with the My Many Colored Days manuscript at first sight, seeing in it an unusual opportunity to create something that is at once both childlike and sophisticated.  

Steve and Lou currently reside in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  


From the Hardcover edition.