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Children’s authors create a magical, musical ‘Bridge’
Birds sing, bees buzz happily and white fluffy clouds float over the little bridge Mr. Fox must cross.
For their second adventure in dynamic-duo publishing, longtime friends Jeanne Mansfield and Gail Lenhard have collaborated on a children’s picture book. The Mystical Magical Musical Bridge follows friendly Mr. Fox, who greatly desires to take an egg from a nearby chicken coop, and gobble it down.
Birds sing, bees buzz happily and white fluffy clouds float over the little bridge he must cross, as the farmhouse sits on the other side of a small river.
As Mr. Fox approaches the bridge, however, the clouds turn dark and the music stops.
The Mystical Magical Musical Bridge, with illustrations by Leah Lopez, is aimed at toddlers. “The moral of our picture book,” Lenhard explains, “is lying and stealing is wrong.”
Adds Mansfield: “Mr. Fox also learns it feels good to do the right thing.”
Some life lessons, of course, are forever. Mansfield, 89, and Lenhard, 71, haven’t had toddlers around for a while now. Most of their grandchildren are adults.
But these St. Petersburg residents know the meaning of “young at heart.” Their previous book, 2022’s I Talk With My Hands, was aimed squarely at small children. It’s the story of an 8-year-old boy who’s deaf, and how he learns to make friends after his family moves to a new city.
As a volunteer for Goodwill-Suncoast’s Children’s Literacy Program, BookWorks, “I was cleaning these books for little toddlers,” explains Mansfield. “All I could see was ‘The ball is red. The banana is yellow.’ How boring is that? I thought we were boring these children to death. I thought if you want to hook them on books, that wasn’t the way to do it.
“And all of a sudden I thought, hmm … why don’t we write something a little more interesting? And that produced the book Really?”
The interactive, humorous and colorful Really? (2016) was followed the next year by a sequel, Absolutely!
Lenhard, meanwhile, was a writer and editor who had also published a children’s book, Tree. They met at a meeting of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
The two became fast friends and edited each other’s stories; Mansfield is currently editing Lenhard’s first YA (young adult) novel.
According to Lenhard, the first version of The Mystical Magical Musical Bridge, pre-illustrations, could have been a short story. “It had too many characters in it, and it was too long for a picture book,” she says. “We decided we needed to condense it, so we got rid of some characters.”
From the start, it was a total collaboration. “For some reason, Gail and I always have the title first,” Mansfield marvels. “I fire two or three lines to her, and she fires back, and the next thing you know we’ve got a book going.
“This is how we work. There’s Gail, there’s Jeanne, and then when we get together, that’s our voice. We work so well together.”
Published by St. Petersburg Press, The Mystical Magical Musical Bridge is available through Tombolo Books, Amazon and the publisher.
