Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio’s ‘The Invisible Parade’ Was a Decade in the Making (Exclusive)

When Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo met Hugo Award-winning artist John Picacio at a 2011 convention, she wasn’t even a published author yet — just a fan. And yet, the way Picacio treated her showed Bardugo they’d one day make a great team.

“He sat down with me at that party where he was, like, the star,  and treated me like a peer before I was one,” Bardugo explains. “ I think that that’s one of the beautiful things about having the passion of fandom and falling in love with somebody’s work. You make a connection, no idea where it will lead, and it brought us here over 10 years later.”

The pair’s new illustrated book, The Invisible Parade, is born out of their shared passions for their respective crafts, their friendship and a deep mutual respect for each other’s work. 

Picacio initially pitched Bardugo the idea as “Wizard of Oz meets the Four Horsemen meets the Dia de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead,” he explains. “We knew all along that we were making an all-ages book, not just a book for kids. We were telling a story that had the values of my Mexican culture, but we wanted this for all cultures.”

The book follows a young girl named Cala, who’s grieving her late grandfather and dreading the annual Day of the Dead celebration. When she gets separated from her family at the graveyard where the party takes place, she meets Four Horsemen who show her she’s braver than she thought.

“The point of it is that there’s a certain way that Mexican culture looks at death, and how we process grief, and not all cultures have those values and those toolkits to deal with grief. And we wanted a story that would help other cultures, people who are not Mexican and Mexican-American to be able to handle those toughest of tough moments,” Picacio explains. 

Putting the book together as a collaborative project felt, to the author and illustrator, much like making jazz music. 

“Like musicians, we would just riff, and we would see where we would get, and we would always know,” Bardugo says, of the moment an idea fell into place. “It was almost like a thunderbolt, where the new idea entered the room that we both could look at and be like, here we go. And then it makes it easy for us to sell that to our editors, our publishers, because we’re both behind it completely.”

“We both understand when greatness walks into the room,” adds Picacio, who called the book’s written story “pure Bardugo magic.”

Both were also very intentional about respecting what each other brought to the page.

“We both respected not just expertise that we were bringing to it, but  our own personal experiences, our own stories built into this,” Bardugo says. “John’s relationship to his culture, my relationship to my family, all of that is built into the book. And so, I think we were both excited by the way those things were pushing up against each other.”

For Bardugo, who drew from her own experience with grief to write Cala’s story, the book can help readers of any age and background navigate that impossible-feeling circumstance of losing someone. 

“Grief can be a very isolating experience, and I think when we see somebody grieving, sometimes we don’t say anything, not because we don’t care, but because we don’t know what to say,” she says. “That can leave people lonely at the worst time to be lonely. And our goal in writing this was to find a way to talk to people about their loss, about grief, that didn’t strictly feel somber, that could be a story, about loss that was also an adventure.”

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The book serves multiple purposes, for that reason. Bardugo notes that it can be a distraction, full of “spooky Halloween deliciousness” for kids who are already excited about the holiday. 

“If you are an adult who’s dealing with loss and processing your own loss while you try to deal with how to explain this to your child, maybe this gives you a doorway to do that, a place to walk through with them,” she adds. “Maybe this book can be something that opens a conversation that you don’t know how to open any other way.”

In short, it’s the kind of book that they hope readers will crack open over and over again, throughout the course of their own lives, experiencing it different ways each time.

“I think we don’t know how to talk about death,” Bardugo says. “And it is an inevitable part of life. John and I are now both over 50, and it means something different to us now than when we started this project so many years ago. And we just wanted to offer people another way to talk about a truly difficult subject.”

The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio is on sale now, wherever books are sold.