It Started as a Pun
EscapePeas follows an advanced race of space exploring peas who, after having ship troubles, wind up on Earth on a pea farm where they set out on a quest to find a way home. What inspired the idea of peas traveling through space?
J.L. McCreedy: Actually, the idea simply started when some peas rolled out of our freezer one evening. Sam said, “Escape peas! That would make a great story!” And then we set about the framework. We wanted the peas to be escaping (obviously!) but wanted to keep it quirky and funny. Peas escaping from prison? Too dark. But interstellar-traveling peas escaping a black hole and avoiding the fate of “Mushy Peas”? Now we’re on to something interesting! But then what?
Well, it just so happens that we live near a village in Italy called Lumignano, and this place really is known as the “Kingdom of Peas,” and they really do have a Pea Festival every year. And at this annual festival, they actually have a King and Queen of Peas! With that in mind, we had this idea drawn loosely from The Wizard of Oz: this concept of a quest to find a greater power that will resolve one’s problems, only to discover that no such greater power actually exists, and that the only one who holds the ability to address the situation is you. Except there are no magical ruby slippers. The answer is entirely within yourself, and sometimes—maybe usually—that answer is a lot more practical than the solution you thought the magical, “greater power” could grant.
So that idea shaped our story. And we thought the idea of the king and queen “just dressing up like this” was funny!
Dr. Sam: Yes, as Jesse mentioned, it originally was just a spur of the moment play on words pun of saying “Escape Peas” in place of “Escapees” and then we just sort of ran with it from there.
How did you come up with the personalities for each of the peas?
Some, like GrumPea and GramPea and SweetPea were just obvious choices. Others came to us as our story progressed. The word play was a lot of fun, and so the personalities really came from finding “pea” words that were fun or silly or endearing. The hats helped show their individuality. We loved the idea of these brilliant, space-traveling-pea-scientists who also share a penchant for kooky hats and dancing and acrobatics. They’re so well-rounded. (Pun intended!)
How do you balance fun storytelling with educational content?
J.L. McCreedy: Stories are inherently informative anyway—even silly ones. There is almost always something thoughtful that can be gleaned from a story, regardless of genre or audience. Since Sam and I both enjoyed the rhyming and imaginative stories like those by Dr. Seuss as children, that aim of entertaining in a quirky and imaginative way is always the goal when we write together. And since children are naturally inquisitive, the idea of adding educational content at the end just seemed like a natural conclusion. Information is always more interesting when there is a story tied to it! We did this same story-and-educational-pages format for Theodore, The Sloth Who Wants to Race, and the kids really got into that back matter during school visits. They loved the sloth facts in particular.
Dr. Sam: Yes, and it was fun and sort of nostalgic digging into old high school biology memories related to Gregor Mendel, the role of Legumes, etc.
What is one message from EscapePeas that you hope young readers take away from your story?
J.L. McCreedy: There are so many things! Be strange! Be adventurous! Be kind and brave! But I guess if I had to pick just one message, it would be: Don’t let obstacles keep you down. It’s so easy to think that, just because you fail at something or if people criticize/make fun of your efforts, or that you find something extremely difficult, it means you can’t achieve the thing for which you are striving. That you’re not good enough. But failure or difficulty or disappointment usually just means that you need to get back up and try again. Think about what you’ve done so far, and then think of what you can do differently that might work this time. I feel this message is extremely important because kids very often internalize criticism, obstacles and failure in really self-defeating ways. It’s normal to face setbacks. When things don’t go as hoped or planned, use your creativity and intelligence to find a way forward. It might not be the solution you want, but there is usually something you can do to move toward your goal. You’ll have to adapt. Sometimes, it will take much longer to reach your goal than you had hoped for. Sometimes, your goal will change. But if you pay attention, that journey of sticking it out when things get tough will show you new things about yourself. Don’t give up!
Dr. Sam: To me, the John Lennon (I think it was him anyway) quote of “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans” is sort of embodied in this story. Being able to roll with the punches and carry on, regardless of what surprises and obstacles life throws at you is an important skill to develop.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram – J.L.McCreedy | Instagram – Dr. Sam | Website
Blast off on a rhyming adventure with a crew of space peas who aim for Pea Planet but end up on Earth. Oops.
Now these plucky peas must face a big, unfamiliar world full of surprises, setbacks, and bumpy detours. Will they panic? Give up? Split apart? Not a chance. With teamwork, courage, creativity, and a little trial and error, they just might find their way home.
EscapePeas is a playful picture book celebrating resilience, friendship, problem-solving, and belonging. Perfect for read-aloud time, it delivers humor, heart, and an uplifting message about what to do when life doesn’t go according to plan.
At the end of the story, young readers can enjoy bonus educational features, including Dr. Sam’s Pea Facts and a Glossary of Super Words.
Lexile® Framework for Reading, Lexile® text measure 550L
40 pages, Paperback
Expected publication May 5, 2026
Capturing the Experience
In Encounter, you share with readers your incredible experiences coping with culture shock, natural disaster, and classroom struggles while teaching at Leulumoega Fou College in Samoa in 1990. What did you most want to preserve about your time in Samoa?
I most wanted to capture the experience, what it taught me, and how it impacted my life following the experience. In capturing the experience, I sought to make the story as immersive as possible for the reader. I want them to feel what I felt when they step on a cockroach in bare feet first thing in the morning, the sweat on their face, tears in their eyes, and how the constant confusion and uncertainty of cultural collision drags us down emotionally. I want my readers to be as confused and uncertain as I was. I want them to face the hard moral choices I faced, and leave them to make their own decisions – what would they do in that time and place? What would they do now? Most of all, I want to preserve the search for wisdom, understanding, meaning and purpose to all the hardship and suffering. The reflective passages are there to help the reader reflect on the bigger picture, but with humility, acknowledging just how limited our knowledge and experience actually are or can be. To make the book immersive, I re-read and studied authors who I thought had done that well – like Steinbeck, Dickens, Hemingway, Frank McCourt, and contemporary thriller writers John Le Carre, John Grisham, and Lee Child. To help make scenes vivid, I returned to poets Shakespeare, TS Eliot, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tolkien. For reflection, I turned to the way CS Lewis and Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife) wrote their reflective pieces.
How did you decide what to include versus what to leave out, especially in more vulnerable or unflattering moments?
My guiding principle was to be honest with whatever I put in, but the need to keep the word count to under 100,000 meant I had to cut a lot out. I approached judgment of others by honestly sharing what they said and what they did so the reader could make their own judgment. Unflattering moments and vulnerability are a necessary part of learning, but also necessary to show contrast. The climb out of the valley of “badness” is only meaningful if we first know how bad that valley was for us.
In the case where I did provide judgement (characters Helen, Tammy, and some others) I did so because it was necessary to show my changing understanding of them – how my initial judgement changed from unflattering to gaining wisdom. This is most important, and most difficult for me to write about, in the case of my relationship with Helen, where my initial assessment slowly changes from someone I’m wary of, to someone I loved and cared for deeply. (The “real” Helen passed away from breast cancer in 2007 as a young mother with two young boys; Tammy passed away in 2021 after a life of overseas service as a teacher and nurse.) However, for many people working overseas as volunteers, aid workers or missionaries, it’s often our fellow workers and those we live with that are the most difficult, not those we go to serve. I wanted to share that experience in the hope that it would help others going through a similar struggle when thrown together with colleagues and co-workers they may not like. I want them to know that even if your negative assessments of difficult people turn out to be true, in true community, you still need to care for them, love them, and recognize you will need to depend on them.
How did your Christian faith shape the way you interpreted your experiences at the time?
We would not have gone to Samoa if we did not at least hold a Christian worldview. And we would probably not have persevered without having the challenge of Jesus words, and the example of both his life, and the lives of many Christians since that time. I mention St Francis and Mother Teresa, but there are many others. This is why each chapter starts with a quote from the words of Jesus, because it was those actual words that challenged me personally each step of the way.
In going to Samoa in 1990, the risk of death was very real since the previous year a field worker had died of Dengue fever, and there were other threats to safety and security we could not control. We believed then, as we do now, that if we died our death would not be an accident – that God would work this for good, for His purpose, and God’s purpose is what gave us purpose in whatever we did. I don’t think we would have willingly engaged in suffering and risked our security, peace, happiness, or life for something that we do not believe to be true. I have looked at atheism, and it is a selfish, meaningless, and purposeless wasteland.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Encounter?
I hope they gain a window into what a life lived with purpose can look like, that such a life can be found following Jesus on the narrow road, that such a life may be hard, and involve suffering, but it will at least be very rich and will lead to an abundant life.
Author links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
When Ian and Heather leave Australia to teach in Samoa they expect hardship. They don’t expect a devastating cyclone followed by the slow dismantling of everything they thought they understood about the world.
Why are they being laughed at? Why is introducing someone offensive? What does respect look like? Navigating traditional Polynesian culture amid disaster, poverty and political tension, exposes their own cultural blind spots, assumptions and questions their deeply held beliefs. Good intentions are not enough. Join with them as they seek purpose and explore what justice, identity, faith and community mean in a radically different culture.
Raw, honest and unexpectedly funny, Encounter immerses you in the lived reality of being an outsider — the exhaustion, the mistakes, the fear, the beauty and resilience of Pacific Island life and community. Moving with the pace of a thriller, Encounter’s true story also wrestles with uncomfortable questions immigrants, travellers, and truth seekers know well: Where do I belong? Why am I here? Who am I when everything familiar is stripped away?
Perfect for readers who love biographies and memoirs that transport you into another world, want to be challenged or need a page turner they can’t put down.
A Floresta Encantada / The Enchanted Forest
The Enchanted Forest, by Isabel Ricardo and translated from Portuguese by José Manuel Godinho, feels like a gentle introduction to longer fantasy stories for middle-grade readers. It’s the kind of book that slowly pulls you in, with just enough magic and emotion to keep you turning the pages.
The story follows a young girl, Rita, who finds herself stepping into a hidden, magical world during what begins as a normal day by the lake. What unfolds is a full-fledged adventure. She meets Bella, the fairy who protects the forest, and is introduced to a world where animals speak, underwater kingdoms shimmer, and every part of nature feels alive. As Rita spends more time in this enchanted space, she meets different animals, each with their own personality, and begins to understand how closely their world is tied to human actions.
What I loved about this children’s book is how it balances wonder with something more meaningful, grounded in our reality. There is magic everywhere, from crystal palaces beneath the lake to quiet forest paths filled with talking creatures, but there is also a clear message running through it. Rita learns that the same world that feels so beautiful is also fragile. Through her journey, she sees the effects of carelessness, pollution, and harm caused by humans. One of the most striking parts of the story is when she helps break a spell on a boy who has been turned into a swan, showing how kindness and second chances matter. Later, when hunters enter the forest, the tone shifts, reminding readers that this magical world is not untouched by danger.
The book also works beautifully for bilingual readers. With both Portuguese and English text, it becomes a great way for children or families to engage with a new language without feeling overwhelmed. I absolutely loved the illustrations as well. They are soft, magical, and detailed enough to draw younger readers into the story, making the forest feel vivid and real.
The Enchanted Forest is a lovely read for children who are ready to move into slightly longer, more immersive stories. It carries a quiet but important lesson about caring for nature, while still feeling like an adventure.
Pages: 135 | ISBN : 1962185761
John B. Peoples
John Peoples’ life has unraveled. He is divorced, stuck in a converted garage, and drifting without any real sense of purpose. Then fortune appears to intervene. He and his boss share a lottery ticket and win a staggering $40 million jackpot. For a brief moment, John believes everything is about to change. Instead, his boss disappears, seemingly intent on claiming the winnings alone. John gives chase, only to suffer a catastrophic spinal injury. Even that does not break him. He presses on through a globe-spanning pursuit, with his share of the money always just beyond reach.
John B. Peoples, by Michael Cowan, is a work of contemporary fiction built around a familiar yet compelling figure. John may call to mind the biblical Job, a man battered by forces that seem arbitrary, relentless, and impossible to make sense of. Trial follows trial. Misfortune arrives without warning. Any promise of stability vanishes almost as soon as it appears.
John is portrayed as an essentially decent man. He has flaws, certainly, but nothing that justifies the endless chain of setbacks that defines his life. He seems marked by misfortune, as though he has been fated to struggle while others move easily toward comfort and success. Yet he refuses to surrender. He is determined to recover what is his, and his vanished half of the lottery winnings becomes more than money. It becomes justice. It becomes dignity. It becomes the embodiment of everything he has been denied.
In many ways, John stands in for the person who grows up in a prosperous society and still never quite manages to get ahead. Cowan taps into that quiet resentment, that weary longing produced by watching others enjoy wealth, security, and privilege while one’s own life is shaped by random, punishing turns. When the possibility of a better life hangs so close, so visible, so maddeningly attainable, how far would someone go to seize it? That is the question at the heart of the novel. Cowan answers it through a character study that feels persuasive, human, and deeply affecting.
Pages: 304 | ASIN : B0D8DS2BW1
What Defines Us As Human
The Dark Side of Dreams follows a woman who resurrects her grandfather’s mind to expose a corrupted digital afterlife built on power, memory, and control. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The Dark Side of Dreams is the stand-alone sequel to Babylon Dreams. Corporate greed and the influence of technology on government are central themes, but the most important questions are what defines us as human and how we see ourselves. The first book was a character study of Gunter Holden, who uploaded himself to his custom digital paradise, Bali Hai, only to face corporate erasure. Unlike Gunter, his granddaughter Mira never imagines a perfect world. When she learns Gunter made a copy of his mind before his deletion, she is determined to find it. Using a device that records and replays her dreams, she finds a clue leading to this hidden copy. When she uploads him to the desolate VR landscape of Shemathra’s Realm, they both risk terrible consequences. In exchange for his help, Mira promises to tell Gunter the truth about the past he never lived.
Mira is ambitious, driven, and morally complex. How did you shape her as the emotional center of the novel?
Both Gunter and Mira grew up without mothers, but while Gunter avoided those memories, Mira secretly hopes hers is still alive. Mira was a lonely child, rejected by her adopted family and neglected by her distant father, leading her to yearn for an identity based on family. Discovering her grandfather was Gunter Holden, the pioneer of the after-death industry, she becomes determined to reclaim his stolen company, VEI, from the corporation SEINI. Her relationship with Gunter is complex; she initially bullies and threatens him to get his cooperation, appearing to him as an AI through a high-tech garment. However, her love for her partner Henry and her deep yearning for connection eventually transform her relationship with her grandfather from one of threats to genuine care.
What first inspired the idea of a corporate-controlled digital afterlife, and how did you approach building a world where death is optional but still deeply unequal?
I was originally inspired by an article on mind-uploading by futurist Ray Kurzweil, which described uploading a mind copy to a VR world. Coming from a background in film production, I was already familiar with “manufactured reality”. I became intrigued by the aftermath of such technology—what happens when life (digital) goes on after the initial choices are made? In the novel, the digital afterlife is a lucrative industry with cutting-edge “paradise” add-ons for the wealthy and “economy plans” for others. This begets new laws and complications, creating a world where even death is subject to inequality.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
As I wrote Mira’s story, I wanted to know how mind-uploading technology changed the outside world. As her story resolved, I was intrigued by characters that waited quietly in the corners—androids with human mind-uploads. Will humanity stretch to meet and accept a new version of ourselves? Prejudices, fears, and conflict are inevitable, but I’m exploring what else might happen. I won’t know for sure until I’m closer to finishing Dream Voyagers, which I expect to be out in the Spring of 2027. I like to stop and look at the world I’m imagining.
Author Links: Website | Amazon
In the high-stakes business of after-death virtual reality, who protects the vulnerable? To escape a digital hellscape of his own making, Gunter Holden—a pioneer of the industry—once chose deletion. A century later, his descendant Mira discovers a preserved copy of his mind-upload.
Mira is convinced her grandfather’s empire was stolen and is determined to reclaim it. But Shemathra is no paradise; citizens must pay tribute to a ruthless Goddess or face agonizing deletion. To expose the systemic violations of VR law, Mira re-uploads Gunter into this blighted, privatized heaven. To earn his freedom, Gunter must witness and record the unspeakable crimes occurring within the system he helped create.
As he wanders a landscape of stolen memories and digital trauma, Gunter strives for a moral awakening. In a future that feels both unsettling and deeply human, will it be enough to save them both?
Obadiah and the Last 100 Prophets of Edom
Obadiah & the Last 100 Prophets of Edom is a biblical historical novel that plays like a faith-driven epic, with palace intrigue, desert escapes, prophetic confrontation, and open warfare all braided together into one long narrative push. It takes the world around Obadiah, Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah and turns it into a high-stakes story about loyalty, persecution, and public belief. From the opening battle sequence onward, the book aims for sweep and intensity, and it rarely lets the pressure off. It isn’t shy about its purpose either. This is a novel built to declare, repeatedly and unapologetically, that history, power, and survival all bend toward one divine truth.
What stood out most to me was how clearly the book understands its own register. The prose is deliberate, solemn, and often cinematic, with short emphatic lines that give scenes a drumbeat rhythm. That style works especially well in moments of danger, whether the story is following hidden prophets through caves, women trying to survive inside Jezebel’s orbit, or crowds gathering for judgment and spectacle. The repeated refrain about one God gives the novel a liturgical pulse, so even when the plot branches into many characters and locations, the book keeps pulling everything back to the same spiritual center.
Obadiah himself comes across less as a conventional action hero and more as a steady spiritual axis for the whole story. Other characters bring different kinds of energy around him: Ahab is proud and unstable, Jezebel is coldly theatrical, Elijah arrives with force, and figures like Jazer, Tobia, Elena, and Hadar help widen the book’s emotional range. I liked that the novel keeps returning to the cost of faith in ordinary bodies and ordinary homes, not just in courts or battlefields. One of its best lines, “Belief does not always remove peril. Sometimes it invites it,” gets at the book’s real subject better than any plot summary could.
The novel also has a strong sense of momentum. Once the hunt for Obadiah and the prophets is underway, the story keeps moving through raids, imprisonments, secret rescues, prophecies, and the long build toward Carmel. Even when the book pauses for speeches or declarations, it still feels like it’s advancing toward a reckoning. By the time it reaches the mountain, it knows exactly what kind of climax it wants, and a line like “The people think fire will decide this,” he said. “But it is obedience that summoned it” captures the book’s mix of drama and conviction really well.
What I came away with, more than anything, is that this book is an earnest, full-throated religious epic. It’s interested in kings and prophets, but also in servants, villagers, prisoners, and those caught between fear and devotion. It treats faith not as background decoration, but as the engine of every choice, every conflict, and every act of endurance. If that’s the kind of novel it set out to be, then it succeeds by committing all the way, with conviction, intensity, and a voice that never backs away from what it believes.
Pages: 125 | ASIN : B0GPMG7WY4
Sincerely Yours…Written In The Stars And Inked In Destiny!
In Sincerely Yours, Sonia D. Hebdon drops readers into Haven Cove in 1989, where Josie, a sharp, music-soaked teenager with a gift for language, falls into a charged romance with her new neighbor Blaine while secretly writing an advice column called “Sincerely Yours.” What begins as an 80s-inflected love story of mixtapes, eyeliner, and illicit nights out steadily opens into something stranger: a paranormal narrative about writing itself, about stories that breathe, unfinished worlds, and the frightening possibility that words do not merely describe reality but conjure it. The novel openly frames itself as a paranormal love story rooted in 1980s music and in the idea that certain writers can create literal worlds, and that premise becomes the book’s true engine.
What I liked most was the book’s unabashed sincerity. Hebdon is not aiming for cool detachment; she wants feeling, and she goes after it in full view. Josie and Blaine are drawn with the kind of heightened, romantic glow that suits the novel’s cassette-tape heart, and the pages are thick with Cure songs, club lights, handwritten letters, and the intoxicating self-invention of adolescence. I found that atmosphere persuasive even when the prose grew ornate, because the book’s emotional weather is so clear: loneliness, awakening, first love, artistic hunger, the longing to be seen as oneself rather than as a role assigned by family or town. The advice-column scenes also give Josie a moral and emotional gravity that keeps her from becoming just another dreamy heroine; her anonymity becomes its own form of courage.
My reaction to the novel’s second half was more mixed, but still engaged. Once the Whitlock Society and the metaphysics of authorship move closer to center stage, the book shifts from nostalgic romance into meta-paranormal fantasy, and that turn is genuinely intriguing. I admired the ambition of a story that asks what happens to unfinished narratives and imagines rare writers as conduits who generate actual worlds. The book feels stuffed with mood, mythos, sentiment, and soundtrack, but that excess is also part of its personality. I never had the sense of a cynical machine at work; I felt the presence of a writer who loves 80s music, believes in the numinous charge of words, and is willing to let teenage feeling burn bright instead of sanding it down into irony.
I’d recommend Sincerely Yours to young adult readers, especially those who enjoy YA paranormal romance, clean fiction, coming-of-age fantasy, and music-laced stories with a gothic shimmer. Readers who love emotionally direct fiction and retro atmosphere will probably be its natural home crowd. In spirit, it sits somewhere between the swooning supernatural pull of Twilight and the mixtape melancholy of an 80s-mad Sarah Dessen alternate universe, though Hebdon’s metafictional streak gives it its own curious voltage. My verdict: this is a heartfelt, melodramatic, odd little spell of a book, and when it works, it reminds me that sincerity is not a weakness but a strength.
Pages: 170 | ASIN : B0FDWQSZLJ
Chinese Zodiac
What I found most striking about Chinese Zodiac: Learn Chinese Calligraphy is that it isn’t really a storybook in the usual sense, so much as a beautifully arranged introduction to the twelve zodiac animals through image and language. Each animal appears first as a soft watercolor portrait, then as its Chinese character in bold black calligraphy paired with a red tracing version, alongside the pinyin and English name: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Chicken, Dog, and Pig. Early on, the book explains its central invitation, which is to lay thin paper over the page and trace the forms, turning reading into a tactile act of imitation and attention.
There’s something genuinely lovely about the alternation between airy animal portraits and the gravity of the brush characters. The tiger feels alert and spring-loaded, the rabbit soft and inward, the dragon almost gleefully serpentine, and the monkey made me smile. The pages have a spaciousness that gives each animal room. That matters, because the book’s real subject is not only the zodiac but the act of looking carefully. I could feel the author trying to teach patience as much as vocabulary, and that gave the book a contemplative charm I didn’t expect.
The writing is minimal. But I don’t think that spareness is accidental. It feels deliberate, almost disciplined, as though the author wants the brushstroke itself to do the speaking. The idea behind the book is appealing to me because it treats language learning as an artistic practice rather than a memorization chore. The tracing instructions at the beginning set that tone beautifully.
I found this to be a graceful, unusually calm children’s book, more like a studio exercise than a conventional picture book, and I mean that as praise. It has a sincerity to it, and a handmade visual warmth, that makes the learning feel intimate. I’d recommend it for young children learning Chinese characters, families interested in calligraphy, teachers looking for a gentle cultural introduction, and adults who appreciate artful educational books that ask them to slow down.
Pages: 28 | ASIN : B0GGDMNW41
