Author Jill Santopolo only meant to invent a fictional picture book for one of her fictional adult characters. That picture book had other plans. The result is Can You Grow a Striped Banana?, a comic, rhyming lament about a grown-up’s whimsical caregiving limitations—and Santopolo’s debut in a format she’s long championed as publisher and editor at Penguin’s Philomel imprint. PW spoke with Santopolo—a literary hyphenate if ever there was one—about the book’s accidental origins, whether anything she said as an editor to an author came back to her haunt her, and the pleasure of working in just about every sandbox the book world has to offer.

You’ve edited many picture books over the years. What prompted you to finally write one of your own?

It actually came out of writing a character for my most recent [adult] novel, The Love We Found [2025]. In all of my novels, you can sometimes see a thread of creative professions—and I needed a picture book that a character was to have written.

Then one morning—this was the summer of 2023, when my daughter was about two and a half—she was sitting in her high chair and I asked what fruit she wanted for breakfast. I listed off bananas, blueberries, whatever we had. And she said, “Could I please have a blue banana?” I told her we didn’t have blue bananas, and she suggested we go to the store. I said the store didn’t have them either. Then she said, “Well, can you just grow one?” I told her I couldn’t grow a blue banana, but how about blueberries? She agreed, but I could tell she was very disappointed in me.

I kept thinking about that line—“I can’t grow a blue banana”—and how it sums up so much of motherhood. There are so many things I wish I could do for my daughter that she wants me to do, or that I want to do, and I just can’t. So I wrote two couplets using that idea for the character’s picture book in the novel. But I couldn’t get them out of my head. I sat down that day and instead of writing the next chapter of my novel, I wrote this picture book text. I sent it to my agent, Miriam Altshuler at DeFiore Associates, and said, “I know I write novels for grown-ups, but what do you think of this?” She wrote back and said, “I think I can sell it.” Miriam sold it to Lauri Hornik at Rocky Pond, who is my dream editor.

How did the illustrator Momoko Abe come on board, and what was it like collaborating with her?

We were already big fans of Momoko’s in our house because of her book The Pet Potato [2022]. So when Lauri and I started talking about artists and Momoko’s name came up, I was like, “Oh my gosh, we love her. Yes, please, please, please ask her.” I think most of my notes to her were like, “Wow.”

As someone who’s spent years on the editorial side of picture books, did your inner editor ever butt heads with your inner author?

The one thing that was really in the forefront of my mind was the fact that I wrote the book in rhyme. That’s something I’m always holding my breath about when I’m reading submissions—is the rhyme actually going to work? Is the meter going to hold up? It’s so hard to do in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re flipping sentences around and convoluting parts of speech just to make the rhyme fit. When I wrote those first two couplets, I thought, okay, two couplets in rhyme, that’s fine. But then I realized I had to sustain it for an entire picture book. I really had to step back and think about whether I could do rhyme well enough to carry the whole thing. I went over it a lot that day and felt pretty good about where I ended up, and then Lauri tweaked it as well. That was the one real moment of editor-brain kicking in—knowing what my writer self wanted to do, but taking a step back to make sure it was the right decision for the project.

You’ve written across a lot of age ranges—adult, middle grade, and now picture books. What stood out for you in this experience?

What was really interesting with this book was feeling like I was in the world of a four-year-old, but at the same time looking at it from an older perspective. There’s a duality of worldviews interplaying in a picture book that I didn’t find when writing middle grade or adult fiction. In this book, the mother is the narrator, but she’s talking to a child, and all the examples are things her child has asked her. She’s the filter through which the ending comes.

And then there’s another layer: the person reading the book aloud is very likely an adult caregiver figure reading to a child. So what the mom in the book is reassuring her daughter of is what the adult reading the book is reassuring the child they’re reading to. That was something I was thinking about, especially with the ending.

This is a very joyful book arriving at a time when the children’s publishing landscape feels a little uncertain. What does it mean to be putting a book out into that world right now?

The children’s publishing landscape always shifts and changes—whether it’s technology, or market conditions, or audience size based on generational trends. It’s never still under our feet. But the thing that does remain constant is that kids love stories, families love reading together, and the stories we put into our kids’ hands shape the way they think about the world. I think it’s always important to be putting books out that bring kids joy and happiness and reassurance and inspiration. Regardless of the shifting landscape, those are the constants.

What’s next for you?

I have a second picture book coming out next spring called My Too Sad Day, which is also very much based on something my daughter said, this time when she was three and a half. I’m also working on another novel for grown-ups. It’s pretty much in the same vein as the other adult books I’ve written—it centers women and families and love—and this one happens to be about three sisters.

Honestly, shifting between formats doesn’t feel so much like switching gears as it does getting to explore a different part of my brain. That’s why I love editing in the children’s book space, too. I get to explore picture books, novels, YA, nonfiction, and board books for babies. It just feels like playing in all these different sandboxes, and they’re all really fun.

Can You Grow a Striped Banana? by Jill Santopolo, illus. by Momoko Abe. Rocky Pond, $18.99 Apr. 21; ISBN 978-0-5938-5885-1