Don’t ask Levi Pinfold to explain the meaning of his hauntingly enigmatic new picture book, Paradise Sands: A Story of Enchantment (Candlewick Studio, Nov. 8). “I’m going to be really annoying and say, it’s supposed to be a mystery,” apologizes the charming 36-year-old author/illustrator during a Zoom call from his home on the Sunshine Coast of eastern Australia. “It’s very tempting to explain exactly what I think about [the story]—but it’s one of those things where you don’t want to spoil the mystery, because that’s half the fun, isn’t it?”
Paradise Sands is certainly an intriguing puzzle. It opens with wordless images of four siblings piling into a dusty white sedan and driving through a desolate, nearly treeless landscape. They stop to pick wildflowers—there aren’t many—and, as the young girl who narrates the tale says, “that was how we left the road.” Soon they come upon a vast, silent palace looming over a spring. As any reader of fairy tales can guess, the children will drink from the spring and enter the palace, thus beginning their surreal adventure—which involves an enormous lionlike creature called the Teller and a menagerie of other animals who might be…humans transformed?
“The idea came from mythology and some of the fairy tales I grew up with and Welsh mythology as well,” says Pinfold, who is originally from the Forest of Dean in England, a historic place brimming with legends of its own. “The Greek myths are hugely important to me. [They’re] a good lens to view history but also an interesting way of understanding your own psychology and how we humans are still the same as we were for millennia, really.”
Pinfold is also inspired by the strong visual images and scrambled logic of dreams. He recalls, “I had this image of a hotel in the desert, bursting into sand, from a dream at some point. It just stuck around in my head. I think in pictures, you know; words come secondary to me.” Likewise, Pinfold’s first depiction of the Teller came straight out of a dream. “I sent the picture off to my editor and my art director, and they said, ‘Well, that’s terrifying.’ It was quite a malevolent person I had drawn…a very vampiric sort of entity.” Eventually the character morphed into its present incarnation: “He’s not quite a lion—there’s something a bit off about him. I wanted him to have a slightly different ear shape and a slightly different anatomy, just to give you that sense that he’s not quite something that you’re familiar with.”
The illustrations that wound up in Paradise Sands are not so much terrifying as quietly menacing—and gorgeous, with the look of extraordinarily detailed paintings in a muted, Andrew Wyeth–like palette. (Pinfold cites Wyeth as an influence.) The artist says that he worked in watercolor and tempera for early books such as The Django (2010) and Black Dog (2016) but has gradually moved toward a more computerized process. For Paradise Sands, he began with a lot of “very loose” watercolor images that he scanned and then refined digitally. “I always want my work to look like paintings,” he says, “so even if I’m using a digital [effect], I think it leaves some warmth if you have at least some traditional elements in there as well. That’s just a personal taste.”
As a young man interested in graphic design and perhaps working in film, Pinfold studied illustration at Falmouth University in England and then found his way into the world of children’s literature. In addition to writing and illustrating his own books, he has created artwork for stories by A.F. Harrold (The Song of Somewhere Else, 2017) and David Almond (The Dam, 2018). His highest-profile job came from U.K. publisher Bloomsbury, which commissioned him to create covers and illustrations for special 20th-anniversary editions of the Harry Potter books. (The U.S. editions featured new covers by artist Brian Selznick.)
How did Pinfold go about the daunting task of reenvisioning the best-known literary franchise on planet Earth? “I said, OK, I don’t want any Harry Potter influence for the duration we do this. And of course, that’s impossible. It’s like trying to forget Star Wars. The best thing I found was to lock myself in a little room and then just read the books and pretend I was 10 years old, reading through this for the very first time,” he says. “How would I picture these characters? The characterization is so strong and everything so well drawn within the books.”
Looking ahead, Pinfold says he’d like to create books for very small children (“I’ve got some running around my house at the moment”) as well as young adult and adult audiences. But he clearly relishes making books for young readers. “I just love their interpretation of things,” he says. “They’ve got such a radical outlook on life, and I love how honest they are. That’s the real appeal of working [on books] for younger kids.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
