The Jingu Magical Garden
In The Jingu Magical Garden, Lillian Jingu, the youngest daughter in a big Japanese American family living inside the Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio in the late 1930s discovers a strange egg by the koi pond, hatches a tiny blue dragon she names Kokoro, and hides him with the help of her brother Kimi, a very dignified turtle, and a tough gray cat. At first, it feels like pure magic and mischief in a hidden garden. Then a crack in time opens, and Lillian and Kokoro are pulled into moments that show how war, rumor, and racism creep into their world and shake the life they love in the tea garden. The story braids fantasy with the real history of the Jingu family and the garden, all the way through World War II and beyond.
I had a soft spot for Lillian right away. She just wants to grow her hair long, wear a white Stetson, blend in at school, and also secretly raise a baby dragon who drinks Coca-Cola and eats sardines out of a tin. That mix of ordinary kid worries and wild magical stuff really worked for me. The family scenes in the Bamboo Room kitchen made me feel like I was sitting at the table, listening to sisters tease each other while their parents try to keep everyone fed and in line. Kokoro is goofy and sweet and a bit chaotic, so every time he bursts out of hiding I could feel my shoulders tense and my brain go “oh no, not now,” in the best way. Some chapters feel cozy and funny, and then the tone shifts, and I felt my stomach drop when hints of war and suspicion started creeping into their everyday life.
The book talks about anti Asian prejudice without turning into a lecture, and that made it more powerful to me. You see how quickly neighbors and officials can turn on a family that has done nothing wrong, and it hurt to watch, because we know this stuff did happen in real life and still echoes today. At the same time, the dragon and the time travel bits keep the story from feeling hopeless, almost like the past itself is reaching out to protect this family and their garden. I liked that the author doesn’t pretend everything gets neatly fixed, but she still gives the Jingus courage, humor, and dignity, and that mix left me sad and hopeful at the same time.
As for the writing, it has a very old radio show vibe in spots, with Buck Rogers and songs on the wireless and little period details tucked everywhere, and I thought that was charming. The garden descriptions are lush and detailed, so I could picture the waterfall, the stone paths, and the hidden corners where a dragon might hide, and those scenes slowed my breathing in a good way. The dialogue can be a bit old-fashioned in places, which fits the time period. Still, the emotional beats land. When the family faces public shaming, name changes, and the loss of their place, the simple language hits like a punch because you already care about these people and this garden so much.
I really enjoyed this children’s book. I would hand it to middle-grade readers who like dragons but can handle some heavier real-world stuff, kids around nine to thirteen who are curious about World War II on the home front, and any young reader who has ever felt caught between cultures or out of place. It would also be great for teachers or parents who want to talk about racism, resilience, and community in a way that feels authentic. If you want a story with cozy family meals, secret magical pets, and real history woven together, this one is a good pick.
Pages: 282 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GCQV9TB9
Truly See
Luna’s Colour Quest follows a little fox who receives a vintage camera and a simple challenge from her grandmother, who discovers that the most beautiful moments aren’t always captured on film, but felt with the heart. What inspired you to create Luna’s story?
I was inspired to create the story of Luna when I would daydream about spending time with my daughter, and wanted to create something that I could share with her when she gets older.
The story explores the difference between looking and truly seeing. Why was that important to you?
I believe that to “truly see” is to allow yourself to be present in a moment, which can sometimes get lost in the noise of technology today, so making that distinction was very important to me.
The watercolour illustrations are very soft and nostalgic. What did you want children to feel when they open the book?
I wanted the world of Willowbrook to feel “lived-in,” so when a child opens the book, they’re dropping straight into Luna’s life, as it’s happening, and they feel a sense of anticipation and excitement along with Luna.
Will Luna return in future adventures?
I honestly thought of this being a one-off story, since I’m a first-time author, but after finishing, I’ve been motivated to explore future stories for Luna.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When Luna receives a beautiful old film camera from her Grandma Fox, she’s given a simple challenge: “Look closely at the world around you.”
As Luna sets off on a colourful picture-taking adventure, she soon discovers that seeing is just as important as capturing.
Luna’s Colour Quest is a heartwarming picture book and the beginning of a gentle adventure about curiosity, creativity, and learning to slow down and notice the magic in everyday moments.
Perfect for children ages 3 – 7, this story celebrates imagination, colour, and the loving bond between grandparents and grandchildren, reminding young readers that some memories are best captured with the heart.
Knowledge Is Power
Where Did Computers Come From? follows two young brothers who find themselves on a time-traveling adventure after they discover a sentient technological construct in their garage. Where did the idea for this story come from?
Ever since my first son, Jacob, was born, I’ve had the desire to teach him all I have grown to know and love about computers. I could not find any STEM-related books for children that taught them about the origins and future of technology.
Growing up in the late 80’s to early 2000’s, technology has seen a tremendous growth and transformation, from payphones to cellular smart phones, from Ataris to Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation, from cassette (mix) tapes and Walkman to Pandora and Spotify. The growth has not stopped, nor do I feel like it will in the foreseeable future, with the continued injection of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and future Quantum technology; however, to grow is also to know the past. My intent was to create a fun, interactive book series to teach the children of today, those that are born with technology at their fingertips, where this all started, so that they can create love and respect for it and also build the technology of the future.
Did you base Jake and Eli on real children or experiences?
I have fond memories as a child, growing up and going to early computer shows at the local racetrack with my father to buy individual computer parts, from RAM, floppy drives, CPUs and coming home to put together what was essentially my LEGO, taking all of those parts and building my own computers. Since that early age I have been taking technology apart and putting it back together. I’ve had a successful career building large computer systems from concept to operations and now focused on the cybersecurity protections of them. I apply all of the knowledge I have gained over the years as the basis of accuracy for these books. The hardest part is putting them in terms kids would understand and enjoy and that is where the magic occurs. My co-conspirators and inspiration for this series are Jacob and Elijah, my two sons (9 and 7 respectively), who I talk through my imaginary concept to ensure it makes sense and is fun.
As a child, I excelled in math and science but struggled with reading and specifically comprehension and retention of information I read. This was the driver for the interactive nature of the book series. Each book has a QR code where parents, teachers and kids can open a webpage with additional supplementary information tailored to the specific story they read to reinforce the concepts. The page content ranges from fun facts, to interactive knowledge check games, and downloadable content such as connect the dots, spot the difference, etc. The play aspect of this makes it not only fun but will hopefully help retain the overall topic taught in the stories.
Techtor is a memorable addition to the story. How did you design this character to feel friendly and approachable for young readers?
The vast majority of us have a fascination with traveling through space and time. It captivates us as we watch super hero adventures or movies that challenge our thinking of moving particles through space. In the first book adventure, we see Jake and Eli traveling through time and going into the past to meet a mainframe computer. In the second adventure, they travel into the innermost parts of a computer to learn how the parts work together. In the third adventure, not yet released, we will see Jake and Eli enter into the world of coding to learn the language of computers. These concepts were drawn from great movies like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or even Willy Wonka where humans were transported through time and space, transformed to particles and reassembled in a different location and/or size.
Can you give us a glimpse inside the next book in the Jake and Eli’s Adventures series?
As such I strive to teach my children that the boom of technology could be used to achieve great things; however, it can also be used for harm. Each book released in the series is intended to build on the previous story. As such, a future book is focused on ensuring that everyone knows how to safeguard themselves while taking advantage of the wonderful benefits we get from technology. This protection would include knowing how to avoid cyber bullies and being aware of what scary “digital” roads not to go down. It will also highlight that protection is not the job of one individual but more of the entire family. Knowledge is power. If you know what you need to be cautious of, the better equipped you’ll be to avoid them.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Have you ever wondered where computers came from? In Jake and Eli’s Adventures: Where Did Computers Come From?, brothers Jake and Eli embark on a thrilling journey through time to uncover the secrets of technology! When their dad encourages them to explore the garage, they meet Techtor—a friendly guide who opens the door to the past. Together, they discover Max the Mainframe, a giant octopus-like computer that processes information in a whole new way! With colorful punch cards and fascinating facts, Jake and Eli learn how computers evolved from massive machines to the personal devices we use today. Filled with excitement, mystery, and fun, this adventure will spark curiosity and inspire young readers to explore the world of technology. Get ready to dive into the past and discover how computers changed our lives forever!
A Tough Subject
Nurse Florence®, What are Signs Something is Wrong with My Kidneys? follows three curious girls chatting with the school nurse at lunch, who want to learn how the kidneys work and what warning signs to look for. What was the inspiration for your story?
I think that in the year 2026, kidneys are still a little bit of a mystery for many people, so I just thought it would be nice to do a book to inform people of the times when they need to see a doctor.
How do you take complex medical terms and turn them into a story that will not overwhelm younger readers and also entertain them to keep them interested in learning more?
It’s the magic of Dow Creative Enterprises® 🙂
What Nurse Florence book has been your favorite one to write so far, and why?
The dementia book with Lindsay Roberts. We tackled a tough subject and still made it very informative. It took 105 drawings to teach the subject and is our longest Nurse Florence®.
If you could give one book to a group of children to introduce them to your series, what book would that be?
The Nurse Florence®, How Does Our Brain Work? book. The brain is fascinating, and we should all have common knowledge about how it works.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | Book Animation | Dow Creative Enterprises® | YouTube | LinkedIn | Amazon
Captain Smiley: The Adventure of the Bouncy Frisbee
Kerry Phillips’ Captain Smiley: The Adventure of the Bouncing Frisbee reads like a warm nod to the superhero comics many of us grew up with. It delivers that bold, comic-book rush. At the same time, it carries a fresh, modern spark that fits comfortably with today’s young readers. The themes feel thoughtful. The representation feels timely. Nothing comes across as dated.
The story begins with a small problem that feels enormous in a child’s world: Ace’s favorite frisbee is lodged at the very top of a tree. A simple playground mishap turns into a real adventure once the kids call on Captain Smiley. He doesn’t arrive with instant fixes or flashy shortcuts. He listens first. He invites ideas. He helps the children work through the challenge together. The rescue is lively and fun, capped by an even more exciting bouncing frisbee, yet the real highlight is the way the journey unfolds.
Under the action sits a steady emotional message. Ace is upset, and that frustration is taken seriously. It isn’t brushed aside. Captain Smiley nudges the children toward naming what they feel, using their words, and supporting one another while they think it through. For young readers learning how to manage big feelings in small bodies, that approach matters.
The artwork lifts the entire book. The illustrations are vibrant, expressive, and full of joy. They capture the comic-book spirit with ease. Every character feels distinct and animated, which keeps the pages visually engaging from start to finish. The representation also lands with real significance. Seeing a superhero who reflects children of color will mean a great deal to many readers. It feels natural and empowering, woven into the story instead of presented as a separate lesson.
The final pages add extra value with activities like word searches and reflection questions, extending the experience beyond the last scene. That makes the book a strong fit for classrooms, family read-alouds, or independent reading time.
Overall, it blends humor, heart, and meaningful representation in a way that stays accessible and genuinely engaging. Captain Smiley is the kind of hero kids will want to return to. Families will appreciate the positive messages tucked neatly inside the adventure.
Your Story Told by Another
Stanley Livingstone’s Your Story Told by Another is a layered allegorical coming-of-age tale: Jacob, a foundling guided (and occasionally heckled) by an enigmatic Old Man, and framed by a present-tense narrator under an oak, moves from childhood missteps into adult moral weather, learning that “Providence” may be less a cosmic GPS than a mirror held up by a “Sender” whose identity the book dares you to recognize as your own. The plot advances by episodic “steps” (sometimes tender, sometimes sharp-elbowed) where everyday scenes, kites, soccer, friendships, a charismatic “Grand Master,” even a deliberately odd “Zombie Club,” become moral instruments, tuned toward the idea that what feels like fate is often an authored interior life.
What I felt most strongly while reading was the book’s insistence on texture over sermon, even when it’s openly didactic. The Old Man’s teachings don’t land as bullet points; they arrive the way uncomfortable truths usually do, sideways, mid-conversation, when you’d rather be anywhere else. One moment, Jacob is a kid sprinting with a stolen kite; the next, he’s being pressed to ask not “what do I do next?” but what kind of thinking precedes action. And later, when the narration turns toward imbalance, hypocrisy, and the Enemy-within, I appreciated how the book refuses to make villains exotic. The perpetrator, the mirror, the self-justifier, those roles commute between “them” and “me” with unnerving ease.
I also liked the framing device. The narrator’s midnight debates with the Snowy Owl and the storyteller turn the novel into a kind of campfire argument about meaning itself, especially around scripture and interpretation. There’s a provocative claim that the Qur’an functions less as a lullaby and more like a decoder, an awakening tool, not a tranquilizer, which gives the book a specific spiritual gravity without pretending the reader’s questions are impolite. The story sometimes pauses to explain what it has already dramatized. But the closing movement won me back: the Epilogue’s quiet, almost fairy-tale intimacy (an Old Man at a gate, a child’s whispered secret) and the final “Morning After” emptiness, oak, dew, no footprints, leave you with the unnerving sense that guidance might vanish the instant you’re ready to blame it for your life.
Your Story Told by Another is for readers who enjoy allegorical fiction, spiritual parable, philosophical coming-of-age, and metaphysical adventure, especially those who don’t mind being gently provoked into self-reflection. If you’ve ever been moved by Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (or, in a more austere register, Hesse’s Siddhartha), you’ll recognize the pilgrimage-as-mirror architecture, though Livingstone’s voice is more argumentative, less lullaby, and deliberately warns you not to “get lost in the metaphors.” This is a strange but earnest parable that I enjoyed.
Pages: 335 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FMC4DCWB
The Thirteenth Cagebreaker: A Cantara Academy Novel
The Thirteenth Cagebreaker is a young adult fantasy set in a glittering, ruthless magic school where talent is currency and control is everything. We follow Sparrow “Roe” Kettler, a dockside voice mage whose mother vanished years earlier after attending Cantara Academy on the same kind of scholarship. When Roe arrives, the academy’s Designating Stone brands her as the thirteenth amethyst, the first student it has ever physically marked, tying her to a secret history of “Cagebreakers” and to a containment machine under the school that feeds on students deemed too dangerous. The book follows her first term as she scrambles to catch up academically, builds a fierce little found family, falls into a complicated maybe-more-than-mentorship with Blaise Arcement, and slowly uncovers a system that cages magic and calls it safety, all building toward a public confrontation that forces the powerful to answer for what they have built.
Roe’s voice is sharp and funny and aching all at once, full of dock slang and small sensory details, like the way her secondhand robes never quite sit right or how academy marble smells different from salt-wet wood. The writing balances that chatty tone with these sudden punches of poetry, especially when it talks about cages, about learning to make yourself small so people feel safe around you. The magic school setting is lush and cinematic, but what stuck with me more than the floating bridges and singing gates was the constant hum of class difference and scrutiny. Scholarship kids sit under the banners near the kitchens, sponsor families glide through the memorial halls, and every hallway conversation is edged with who has power and who is expected to be grateful.
What surprised me most was how much this fantasy plot about a containment Vault and a secret Cagebreaker Protocol ends up feeling like a story about being told your feelings are too loud. The author keeps coming back to this idea that systems call it “control” or “stability” when what they really want is compliance. Roe’s training scenes hurt, especially when teachers tell her to forget the work songs that kept her community alive or label her survival magic as “crude” and unprofessional. At the same time, there is a very tender through-line: Minna and the other scholarship kids who adopt Roe almost on sight, the quiet solidarity in the library stacks, and Blaise choosing truth over the legacy he was born to protect. The slow-burn romantic fantasy element feels earned because it is built out of hard choices and shared risk, not just witty banter. I did feel the book’s “Book One” status in the last stretch; the big machinery of the world is still turning when you hit the final page, but Roe’s emotional arc from scared scholarship girl to someone willing to testify in front of the Board feels complete enough that the ending lands.
The author is not shy about institutional abuse, parental abandonment, or the way grief sits in the body, and she flags that clearly right up front, which I really appreciated. The story keeps a thread of stubborn hope running through all of that, though. Roe does not magically fix the system with one song, and she does not become perfectly controlled or endlessly forgiving. She keeps choosing, again and again, to tell the truth, to ask better questions, to trust the people who have actually earned it. That repeated choice gives the book this grounded, almost defiant optimism. It feels less like a fantasy about a chosen one and more like a fantasy about a girl who refuses to let the people in charge decide what her magic is for.
If you like young adult fantasy that mixes a moody magic school, found family, and a slow-burn romance with sharp conversations about power and control, I think you will really click with this. It is especially for readers who have ever been told they are “too much” or who grew up squeezing themselves smaller to fit someone else’s comfort. If you are up for a character-driven, emotionally intense ride that feels like a friend taking your hand and saying, “You were never meant to live in that cage,” then this book is absolutely worth your time.
Pages: 457 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0G6LRSPM3
MERRY-GO-ROUND BROKE DOWN: A NOVEL OF GREED, GUILT, AND GLOBALIZATION
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, by authors David Woo and Margalit Shinar, is a multi-voice social thriller that uses one high-stakes frame, a hostage crisis in a Manhattan hotel bar in September 2008, to pull you through nine character stories that span continents and years. Each chapter drops into a different life, from a Chinese factory-town power broker facing the “sell or shut down” pressures of reform to an immigrant caught in the machinery of subprime mortgages, to a Wall Street salesman selling risky bonds with a straight face. The stories braid back toward that locked door in New York, where the gunmen fight to be seen and heard, even as the world looks away.
What struck me first is how the authors keep the book readable without sanding off the sharp edges. They don’t hide the ugliness. People say cruel things. They rationalize. They grab what they can. And yet the prose often stays concrete and physical, like the polished bull-and-bear centerpiece glinting under a chandelier right before everything goes sideways. I also liked the structure: each chapter feels like a self-contained novella with its own weather, its own pace, its own moral pressure. That gives the book momentum, and it also makes the argument feel earned.
The authorial choice that worked best for me is the refusal to make globalization an abstract villain. It shows up as a chain of handoffs. A mortgage gets “sold onward to some other idiot,” and a person’s life gets dragged with it. A town council in Norway weighs shiny civic dreams against risk, while a salesman performs confidence like it’s oxygen. Even the more cinematic moments land because they come with character texture, like Tomoko snapping from fear into action on a bus, doing something messy and brave and human. The didactic impulse sometimes peeks through, especially when a character’s inner monologue turns into a tidy thesis. But most of the time, the book earns its big ideas by putting them inside real choices, with real consequences.
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down is a contemporary fiction novel with the propulsion of a financial thriller. It’s fiction, but it wants to explain the world while it entertains you. I’d recommend it most to readers who like big-canvas, idea-driven novels and don’t mind sitting with moral discomfort, especially people interested in how the 2000s boom-and-bust era rippled across borders and into ordinary lives. If you want a story that makes you look up from the page and think, “Wait, is this how it really works?,” then it delivers.
Pages: 323 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GFQ83FLL
