Something Simple
The Elephant Trumpets in the Morning follows a joyful elephant whose daily dawn trumpet transforms the jungle’s initial annoyance into a shared morning tradition that builds confidence and community. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration actually came from a joyful little morning routine of my own. My husband and I would get such a good chuckle out of it that, eventually, he started his own version. Before we knew it, we were both looking forward to these little moments every morning.
It made me think about how something so simple, something you do just because it makes you happy, can become contagious in the best possible way. That’s really where the elephant’s story began. His morning trumpet is his own little celebration of a new day, but eventually that joy spreads to everyone around him.
What does “Elephant O’Clock” capture about the way a child’s personal ritual can grow into a shared sense of belonging?
Honestly, “Elephant O’Clock” is just a fun saying! In my household, we have a habit of naming everything or coming up with little expressions for things. It’s almost like the military and their “oh-dark-thirty.” We have our own little language, and that’s part of the fun.
But when I think about it, those little sayings and routines do create a sense of belonging, don’t they? They become something everyone recognizes and shares. That’s what happened with the elephant. What started as his own joyful morning ritual eventually became something the other animals recognized and looked forward to.
I think children experience that same thing with their families and friends. It’s those little traditions, funny expressions, and everyday moments that become special because they’re shared. Sometimes belonging is as simple as having something that makes everyone smile.
What do Reggie Howard’s close-ups and exaggerated expressions bring to the elephant’s character that you hoped would resonate with young readers?
Oh, the fun of it all! The beauty, the excitement, the personality! I think Reggie captured it beautifully. His close-ups and expressions really bring the elephant to life. You can see his joy, his excitement, and his personality without even reading a word.
And that’s something I love about children’s books. Sometimes the illustrations tell just as much of the story as the words do. I wanted children to feel the elephant’s happiness, to laugh at his expressions, and to enjoy every moment of his morning routine. I think Reggie accomplished that wonderfully.
What guided the different lesson explanations for ages three to six and six to nine, and how do the elephant facts complement them?
I really thought about how children at different ages experience stories. For the little, little ones, sometimes fewer words are better. They’re enjoying the pictures, the characters, and the fun of the story. But as children get older, they naturally start asking more questions. They want to understand why things happen and what they mean. So I wanted to give them a little more to think about.
And the elephant facts? Well, that’s just another opportunity to learn something! I love when a children’s book can entertain and educate at the same time. The story introduces children to this joyful little elephant, and the facts give them an opportunity to learn more about real elephants. It encourages curiosity and, hopefully, a few more questions!
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Every morning, without fail, one cheerful elephant lifts his trunk and trumpets to greet the day. No one knows exactly why, but his simple, consistent act soon inspires the entire jungle to rise, get ready, and begin their day with purpose.
Through playful rhythm and a heartwarming message, this story helps young readers understand the importance of routines, trying their best, and starting each day with confidence and joy. Perfect for children ages 3 to 7, it gently encourages independence, responsibility, and a positive mindset in a way that is both fun and meaningful.
A delightful read-aloud for families and classrooms, The Elephant Trumpets in the Morning reminds us all that small daily actions can make a big difference and that every morning is a chance to show up, belong, and shine.
Life is Full of Obstacles
Captain and Me at Sea! follows a brave pirate and his brightly colored parrot as they set out on an adventure to investigate a mysterious object at sea. What was the inspiration for your story?
Captain and Me at Sea! was born from a deep love of children’s books and a dream to create one of those books that families would pull off the shelf and read again and again!
How did you develop Captain’s personality, and what does Me bring to the story that Captain couldn’t provide alone?
I knew Captain had to be adventurous. As I wrote, rewrote, and edited the story, Captain and his world started to unfold into what Captain is today. Captain is curious, brave, and clever.
Me is Captain’s feathered friend and adventure companion. Me tends to bring in a different perspective to the obstacles. Very importantly, he brings lots of humor to the story!
Captain encounters several different obstacles during the voyage. What did you want those challenges to teach young readers?
Behind all the obstacles that Captain encountered, I wanted younger readers to see and learn from Captain’s resilience. Through life we will encounter obstacles, but stopping and breathing deep will help us get through those obstacles!
Will this picture book be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
Captain and Me at Sea! is just the beginning! A coloring book, and book two is in the works, so stay tuned!
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The Aging Code
Robert J. McCunney’s The Aging Code takes a familiar question- why some people live longer than others- and builds a medical thriller around the unsettling possibilities behind it. Anna Carlson, a health journalist at the New York Times, is investigating the science of aging while her partner, Dr. Dan Murphy, settles into a position at the United Nations medical clinic. Their work draws them toward troubling medical questions and the political tensions surrounding Russia’s war against Ukraine. A separate storyline follows a Russian geneticist navigating the dangers of leaving his country. Together, these perspectives give the novel a broad scope, with scientific discovery, professional responsibility, and international intrigue all competing for attention.
The science is a substantial part of the reading experience. McCunney spends considerable time on genetics, gene therapy, premature aging, and the communities known as Blue Zones, where unusually long lives invite closer study. Anna’s interviews with researchers give readers a way into these subjects through questions they might ask themselves. There’s an appealing curiosity to her reporting, especially when she considers how laboratory findings might affect actual families. The book also keeps returning to the difference between living longer and enjoying those additional years in good health. That interest gives this medical mystery a meaningful center. Some conversations become lengthy explanations, and readers who enjoy learning alongside the characters will have plenty to consider. Those passages establish a measured pace as the investigation develops.
Anna and Dan’s relationship was very compelling for me. They encourage each other, compare ideas over meals, and bring different professional skills to the same emerging questions. Their affection is expressed frequently, giving their working partnership a strong personal foundation. The scenes involving a worried mother and her young son are especially effective at bringing the discussion of aging into everyday life. A child’s enthusiasm for books, toys, and dogs makes the stakes feel immediate. Elsewhere, the Ukrainian characters bring the effects of war into conversations about family, displacement, and humanitarian support. McCunney also enjoys showing readers around his settings. Manhattan restaurants, London streets, Boston laboratories, and Sardinian villages receive enough attention to make travel and place part of the book’s personality.
As a political thriller, The Aging Code builds tension through competing interests, uncertain loyalties, and the risks that accompany sensitive research. The chapters move among several viewpoints, letting readers watch pressures develop in different locations. Its strongest feature is the connection between scientific ambition and the people whose lives could be changed by it. The writing is direct, with dialogue carrying much of the explanation and plot. Even so, the novel’s enthusiasm for medicine and its concern for vulnerable people give it a clear identity. Readers drawn to biomedical suspense, investigative partnerships, and fiction that makes room for substantial scientific discussion will find an ambitious combination here.
Pages: 404 | ASIN : B0H7QLV3TR
American Destiny: A True Story of Family, Roots, and the Journey Between Two Worlds
American Destiny by Marcella Luiso Flanagan and Phyllis Clare Orlowski is a family memoir about inheritance, belonging, and the experience of discovering a homeland through people who’ve kept its memory alive. Its central journey takes the Argenti family from New York to southern Italy in 1948, where thirteen-year-old Marcie encounters the towns her parents have described throughout her childhood. The book brings together personal recollection, scenes built around dialogue, regional history, and family recipes. Its guiding conviction appears in the introduction: “Our heritage does not disappear. It travels with us, enriches us, and adds color and beauty to our new homes.” That belief gives the narrative its purpose and emotional consistency.
The book’s most persuasive passages show how heritage is practiced. In the kitchens of Acquaviva delle Fonti and Cassano delle Murge, preparing focaccia, shaping orecchiette, and baking biscotti become occasions for instruction, conversation, and affection. The recipes extend these scenes by giving readers something tangible to carry beyond the page. As Nonna Angela puts it, “Focaccia doesn’t rush.” The line captures the patience that governs both the cooking and the exchange of knowledge between generations. Evening walks, communal ovens, music, and religious celebrations receive similarly close attention. These details give Apulia a recognizable social texture, showing how daily routines connect households to a larger community. Photographs and family artwork strengthen the sense that the book is preserving a collection of experiences entrusted to its authors.
Marcie’s perspective supplies the memoir’s most engaging personal dimension. She’s observant, artistically inclined, and often unsure of herself beside her accomplished older sister, Lilly. Her attention to fabrics, clothing, and craftsmanship gives the narrative a distinctive focus, while her difficulties with language and self-expression make her efforts to participate feel consequential. The women around her emerge as important teachers whose influence reaches through practical skills, standards of presentation, and encouragement. At the same time, the family’s expectations concerning courtship, reputation, and conduct reveal how closely individual choices are watched. The affection between relatives is evident throughout, and the book becomes more interesting when that affection meets the complications of growing independence. Its account of belonging includes both the comfort of recognition and the pressure of expectation.
The writing favors extensive sensory description and openly expressed emotion. This approach suits the memoir’s commemorative purpose, particularly when a specific gesture, exchange, or household task carries the feeling. Repeated references to golden light, enduring family bonds, and the weight of history sometimes slow the pace, while explanatory passages about landmarks and customs can interrupt the immediacy of a scene. The short chapters make the material accessible, although the narrative would gain force from greater compression in places. Even with that unevenness, American Destiny sustains a clear attachment to its people and places. Readers interested in Italian American family history, regional food traditions, and the formation of a young person’s sense of self will find much to consider. Its lasting appeal lies in the attention it gives to how families teach their children to recognize where they come from.
Pages: 370 | ASIN : B0GGGQRV55
All The Things I Want To Tell You: A Window Into the Life of an American High Schooler Through Poetry
C.J. Canino’s All the Things I Want to Tell You is a poetry and prose collection about growing up with a busy mind, strong feelings, and a demanding set of expectations for yourself. Written during her teenage years, it brings together reflections on friendship, first love, family, faith, and mental health, alongside responses to the dangers and injustices young people see around them. What drew me in was the tension between understanding yourself and knowing how to live with that understanding. Canino’s speakers can recognize their own patterns and still struggle to change them. They want closeness, worry about being too much, and question whether their achievements make them worthy of affection. That mix gives the collection an intimate, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. You’re reading someone trying to find words precise enough to explain feelings that keep shifting.
Canino has a knack for giving emotions bodies, personalities, and competing agendas. Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Love become creatures whose behavior makes inner conflict easier to picture. Oceans, fire, flowers, and broken glass also recur throughout the collection, creating connections between poems about very different experiences. I especially appreciated the smaller, everyday observations: remembering something a loved one wanted in a shop, noticing the comfort of a familiar sweatshirt, or finding reassurance in someone’s touch. Those details give the writing texture and make its affection feel personal. The poems move between loose rhyme and conversational free verse, often using short lines to slow down a thought or emphasize a question. There’s a directness to the voice that makes it easy to follow, even when the emotions being explored are complicated.
The collection’s intensity is both a strength and a source of repetition. Images of burning, breaking, and drowning appear frequently, and some longer poems explain feelings that their strongest images have already communicated. I found the writing most effective when Canino trusted a concrete detail or allowed a contradiction to stand without resolving it. A little more restraint in those passages would give individual lines more room to register. The prose adds a welcome change of pace and develops the relationship between religious belief, queer identity, and the desire to be loved. The closing interview and glimpses of early drafts are worthwhile additions, too. They let you see how writing fits into Canino’s life and how she uses it to examine her reactions. That context makes the book feel like an invitation to take young people’s creative work seriously.
I recommend All the Things I Want to Tell You to older teens and young adults who enjoy personal, emotionally direct poetry, particularly readers familiar with perfectionism, intense friendships, or questions about faith and sexuality. Parents and educators willing to listen closely to a teenager’s perspective could also find a lot to consider here. The collection includes explicit depictions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, and school shootings, so its emotional weight matters when choosing a reading audience. Alongside that distress, there’s considerable tenderness: gratitude for friends, love for family, attention to animals, and pleasure in small moments. Canino’s willingness to put all those feelings on the page is the book’s strongest quality. It gives readers plenty to recognize, question, and talk about.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0HLJFZCGT
Rain on the Roof, Wind in the Spruce
A dream of freedom gets complicated the minute somebody else has to live inside it. That’s the lively, sometimes painful territory of Tanyo Ravicz’s Rain on the Roof, Wind in the Spruce, a novel about a couple raising two young children on a remote homestead on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. Jason Everblue wants a life he can build with his own hands, close to the land and answerable to his own convictions. His wife, Brenda, a physician, brings her own hopes, her professional identity, and an acute awareness of what their children need. Their home, Wildwood, becomes the place where all those desires have to coexist. Ravicz makes that experiment absorbing because he gives its pleasures and its costs equally close attention.
The alternating perspectives of Jason and Brenda are the book’s strongest feature. Jason can describe a wildflower so beautifully that you understand his devotion, then say something to Brenda that makes you want to interrupt him. His enthusiasm is infectious, his pride formidable, and his capacity for tenderness tangled up with his need to control the terms of their lives. Brenda’s voice has its own wit and heat. Her childhood experience of poverty gives practical weight to her feelings about doing without, while her delight in the homestead keeps complicating her frustrations. You believe in the attraction between these two, including the friendship and physical desire that keep drawing them together. You also feel the exhausting repetition of their arguments. Ravicz understands how a marriage can hold fierce affection, resentment, laughter, and incompatible wishes in the same small room.
The writing has an appetite for the physical world. Spruce pollen, slippery beach stones, birdsong, wet laundry, and the smell of freshly worked lumber all receive the kind of attention that makes a place feel inhabited. Bears have individual habits and temperaments; the sea sets the terms of travel; changing light alters the emotional weather inside the cabin. There’s real satisfaction in the practical business of building and maintaining Wildwood, and plenty of humor in the gap between a grand intention and a stubborn piece of equipment. The detailed construction passages and expansive philosophical reflections ask for some patience. At their best, they show thought developing through work: a water pump, a roof beam, or a walk along the shore becomes an occasion to reconsider what freedom actually requires.
I think what gives the novel its force is the way those questions remain entangled with other people. Every claim to independence has consequences for a spouse, a child, or a neighbor, and the small community around Wildwood adds warmth, friction, and a welcome range of personalities. As the story gathers momentum, its suspense grows out of conditions Ravicz has made tangible: weather, distance, human judgment, and the limits of a body. The quieter passages earn their place, too. A shared meal or a child’s delighted observation can carry extraordinary feeling because we understand the effort and vulnerability surrounding it. This is a book for readers who enjoy close observation, outspoken characters, and love shown in the daily work of staying together. Ravicz puts saltwater in his sentences and the full, unruly force of family life on the page.
Pages: 286 | ASIN : B0HHFR1RJJ
The Heir
R. W. Kelley’s The Heir is a historical horror novel that turns Windsor Castle in 1795 into a place where family ambition and royal power reach straight into a woman’s private life. Anne-Marie DuPont, a French noblewoman living in England after fleeing the Revolution, enters the royal household through an arrangement made by her father. The Crown’s demand that she produce a male heir places her body and independence under relentless pressure. It’s a premise with immediate emotional force, especially because Anne-Marie already knows how little room her upbringing leaves for her own wishes. Kelley builds the story around that struggle for ownership of her life, giving the elaborate clothes, titles, and ceremonies an ugly significance. Every privilege comes with someone else’s claim on her.
The castle’s everyday routines are some of the book’s most effective sources of dread. Meals, bathing, and lessons in etiquette become occasions for supervision, humiliation, and enforced obedience. Kelley makes you pay attention to who gets to speak, who decides when someone can eat, and whose comfort matters in a room. Anne-Marie’s first-person narration keeps those pressures close, letting us experience her anger, self-doubt, and attempts to make sense of the people around her. Her attachment to a ruby necklace adds a welcome thread of tenderness, connecting her to memories of her mother. I also found the treatment of loyalty compelling. Affection, dependence, and devotion to social rank can pull people toward choices that serve the powerful, even when the personal cost is painfully clear.
This book reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels imagine systems that treat women’s fertility as a resource controlled by authority, and both show women helping enforce the rules that constrain them. Anne-Marie’s position recalls Offred’s in the way an apparently orderly household organizes itself around reproductive coercion. Kelley gives that shared concern a Gothic setting and an increasingly graphic expression. The invented royal world is full of imposing rooms, restricted movement, and conversations whose polite wording carries a threat. Its concentration on one woman’s experience makes the abuse of power feel immediate and personal. If Atwood’s novel made you think about how institutions turn domination into duty, you’ll recognize that same disturbing logic operating throughout The Heir.
The prose is direct, and Kelley puts Anne-Marie’s emotions plainly on the page. That makes her distress easy to understand, although the repeated descriptions of fear, nausea, and helplessness sometimes slow the momentum. The antagonists also speak their cruelty so openly that their scenes can feel predictable, even as the situation grows more dangerous. I found the quieter details, especially the control exercised through food and manners, particularly persuasive. As the novel progresses, it commits fully to graphic bodily horror and sustained emotional intensity, giving its themes a harsh physical weight. My strongest impression is of a furious story about the human cost of preserving status and bloodlines. For readers drawn to Gothic horror with a strong interest in bodily autonomy, it offers an unsettling, tightly focused experience.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0HFBNK2CX
Boment of Profound Powerlessness
Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second? follows a transfemme writer who retreats to the Catskills as the world collapses beneath rising seas and ecological horrors to wait for the apocalypse. How did you develop the title, and what does the idea of looking directly at something represent within the story?
The book is set around, and was inspired by, a full lunar eclipse I saw in 2024, from a Catskills lakeside setting like that of the book. Climate anxiety had been weighing on me particularly hard, and the awesome sight of this massive natural event felt akin to a cosmic/sublime moment of profound powerlessness and ego death. The caution not to look directly at the eclipse except for very briefly during its totality, struck me as a juicy metaphor for our inability to look directly at ourselves as individuals or a species for fear of realizing our weakness, smallness, and mortality. Through this “Perseus’s shield,” reflection, the book’s anxious protagonist looks anew at the stories they tell themself about themself, whether those be pertaining to gender, privilege, desirability, the right to take up space, and how to find or make value during precarious times.
How does the story examine the difference between seeking acceptance from others and finding permission to live authentically?
A working title for the piece was, “if a bear transitions in the woods with nobody to see it, did it really happen?” I didn’t make the title much shorter! The story explores whether it is meaningful to create art nobody will see, and whether social framework-stories like gender authenticity and being hot can exist without being witnessed and agreed upon. When (eco)systems like cities, societies, political tribalism etc get dwarfed by nature revolting, what does that mean for the impact of things like gender transitioning, kindness to others vs self, and living vs just surviving?
How does the natural environment function as both a physical threat and a reflection of the story’s emotional themes?
Serious hikers have an expression, “the mountain doesn’t care.” It means that nature as a whole is indifferent to humans’ stories, egoes, excuses, and identities. Under ecological collapse, nature is no longer ‘out there,’ it’s all there is. Yes, the story features dangerous humans, mammals, arachnids, plants, and fungi, but the thematic threat to the protagonist is that their stories about what they stand for no longer work, maybe don’t even matter.
How does the story challenge conventional ideas about bodies, desirability, and what it means to feel comfortable in one’s own skin?
I’m a disabled, nonbinary, neurodivergent person, all experiences that trouble desirability and normative sex and intimacy. I also identify as a queer ‘bear’ archetype (the embracing of larger bodies, body fat and hair as both morally neutral and hot.) The protagonist of the story, who is not a mouthpiece for my own beliefs, by the way, struggles with how their body can be desirable despite multiple active visible parasites and monstrous excess of erogenous zones. They swing between two poles: wanting their gender performance and chosen body type to make them both sexy and monstrous; and feeling they can only be themself when not being perceived, commented on, or evaluated at all. I don’t propose any tidy answers to this friction because answers are elusive, and friction is more fun anyway. Thanks!
