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By: centraljersey.com
Erica S. Perl has written picture books like Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early and Ninety-Three In My Family. Ms. Perl also published her first novel for young readers, Vintage Veronica, this year, and is making her first appearance at the Princeton Children’s Book Festival.
Her newest picture book, Dotty, tells the story of Ida, a girl with an imaginary friend named Dotty. Dotty is a giant creature who’s a combination of a lion, cow, pig, goat and cat. She got her name because of her big red and pink spots.
When Ida starts school, she learns that other kids in her class have imaginary friends too.
"But as the school year goes on, all the other imaginary friends drift away but Dotty is still front and center," Ms. Perl says. "All of a sudden Dotty changes from being something that helps her fit in and play with her friends, to being something she feels self-conscious about." Ms. Perl’s own childhood imaginary friends inspired the story. Her first imaginary friends were twins who weren’t the same age (hey, she was a kid, so it made sense). Everyone thought that was cute, but she kept another pretend friend to herself a few years later.
"I didn’t tell people about that one because I felt like I had sort of gotten too old for it," she says. "So I wanted to tell a story about how things that are so important to you when you’re very little, you get to a point where you start feeling pressure to give up things that you feel are babyish."
That led to Dotty, and its theme of the glories of imagination, no matter how old we get.