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Theatre History
Play! follows two cousins and their eccentric neighbor as their outing to see Peter Pan takes them on a time-traveling adventure through theatre history. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As a young theatre professional, I worked often with Birmingham Children’s Theatre, and I spent a lot of time in audiences full of schoolchildren and the brave teachers trying to remind them, just before the curtain rose, that this was not quite the same thing as recess. I remember thinking how helpful it would be if there were a fun way for children to learn a little theatre etiquette before they ever set foot in the playhouse.
Later, while I was teaching theatre at Samford University, I wrote an early picture-book version of Play! and had an art professor colleague illustrate a few pages. We came tantalizingly close to publication, but the editor who was championing the project moved to another company that didn’t publish children’s books. Then life did what life often does: my artist friend and I both hit stretches of personal upheaval, and the manuscript sat quietly on a shelf for quite a while, trying to be patient.
A few years ago, a school librarian encouraged me to return to it, and I sent it to Sheila Booth-Alberstadt of SBA Books in Daphne, Alabama. She loved the idea, but wisely suggested that instead of a picture book for younger children, I turn it into a chapter book for middle graders. Once I made that shift, the story opened up in all sorts of exciting ways. I found a wonderful illustrator, Jarrett Rutland, and we worked on the book for about a year. After several rounds of editing and design, Play! is now heading out into the world, which is both thrilling and slightly surreal.
As for the setup itself, I wanted two children because I liked the idea of a boy and a girl responding differently to what they were seeing. And since I wanted them to travel through important eras in theatre history, they clearly needed an adult guide. At that point, an eccentric professor more or less materialized, tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that he intended to be in the book. It is generally unwise to argue with someone named Dr. Dante Marlowe Browne, so I let him in.
Why did you choose Peter Pan as the event that launches the adventure?
I have always admired J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan is one of those rare children’s stories that is full of delight and theatrical fun, while also carrying something deeper and more wistful underneath. It turns childhood into myth, but it also tells the truth about it: that it is radiant, reckless, imaginative, and already shadowed by loss.
The story captures both a child’s fear of growing up and an adult’s longing for the vanished world of childhood. Peter represents freedom, adventure, and the intoxicating idea that no one can make you do arithmetic ever again. Wendy, on the other hand, brings story, tenderness, order, and the first stirrings of maturity into Neverland. I love that balance. Barrie gives us both the wild freedom of childhood and the ache of knowing it cannot last forever.
But Peter Pan also seemed the perfect launching point for Play! because it is such a glorious theatrical experience for children. Characters fly, a crocodile ticks, pirates swagger, fairies interfere, and the whole thing is drenched in stage magic. Nana is portrayed by an actor in a dog suit, and Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are traditionally played by the same actor, which is exactly the sort of glorious stage nonsense children ought to encounter early in life. It is a play that invites young audiences not only to watch, but to fall in love with the sheer imaginative mischief of theatre itself.
How did you balance historical accuracy with storytelling and humor?
Having worked in theatre for nearly sixty years, I know the history pretty deeply, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I certainly wanted the historical material to be accurate, but I never wanted it to feel like children were being marched through a lecture with a few jokes scattered on top as a reward for proper behavior.
The good news is that theatre history is wonderfully cooperative in this respect, because it is already full of larger-than-life people, ridiculous mishaps, flamboyant personalities, and moments of sheer absurdity. In other words, it comes with its own humor built in. I didn’t have to manufacture too much of that. I simply had to let the children and the professor stumble into it.
So my goal was always to make the story feel alive first. I wanted young readers to have the sense that they had slipped backstage into the past and found it still bustling along, with everybody in costume and nobody entirely behaving.
What can young readers learn from live performance that they can’t learn elsewhere?
Live theatre is one of the richest gifts parents and teachers can give children. Reading is, of course, foundational and wondrous. It shapes language, imagination, attention, and a lifelong love of learning. But theatre offers something reading alone cannot: an immediate, communal, multi-sensory encounter with story.
In a theatre, children are not simply being told that a character is frightened, brave, selfish, lonely, or kind. They are watching those emotions and characteristics unfold in real time through voices, faces, bodies, music, silence, scenery, and the electric presence of living actors only a few feet away. They learn empathy because they can feel an entire audience leaning toward the same moment together. They learn attention because theatre asks them to listen, watch, and imagine all at once. And they learn that stories are not abstract things trapped in books; stories can breathe right in front of them.
Theatre also teaches children how to be an audience, which is no small thing. It teaches patience, curiosity, concentration, and respect for a shared experience. It says, in effect, “For the next little while, let us all agree to enter another world together.” In an age of constant distraction, that may be one of the most valuable lessons of all.
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“Barbara Sloan has written a charming book that will make kids and grown-ups alike fall in love with the history and the magic of live theatre. Through the magic of their friend Professor Browne, cousins Violet and Collins are transported across time and distance to experience what it was like to be everything from groundling at the Globe Theater, to a part of the Chorus in Ancient Greece— and why maybe it’s not a good idea to throw rotten apples at actors in any age!”
Roger Day is an award-winning children’s songwriter and performer known for his witty, literate lyrics and music that delights kids without talking down to them.
“Time travel through theatre history from Ancient Greece to a Medieval Village in York to Commedia dell’arte to Shakespeare himself at the Old Globe, and all the way to the contemporary Sizzlepop Theatre, Barbara Sloan has created a theatrical romp through the ages in PLAY. With such real characters in Collins and Violet, best friends and cousins, who journey with Uncle Marley in the world of storytelling and plays, this is a story of comedy, tragedy, theatre etiquette, and everything in between. The gorgeous illustrations of Jarrett Rutland and the beautiful language of Sloan masterfully raise the curtain to inspire, teach, and invite young readers to explore the world of theatre through characters, masks, lyres, costumes, and spectacular adventures.”
Kerry Madden-Lunsford is an acclaimed children’s and young adult author celebrated for her lyrical storytelling and deep compassion for young people finding their voices.
I Wanted A War
A Shroud Undone follows a haunted hunter drawn back into an ancient war between humans and the Sylphar, where faith, grief, old gods, and impossible choices collide in a brutal struggle to end generations of bloodshed. What inspired the ancient conflict between humans and the Sylphar?
I wanted a war that had gone on so long nobody alive remembered why it started, and yet both sides were completely convinced they were right. The Stillight burns above the Mountain Temple, this double helix of red and gold, and both humans and Sylphar believe it validates their claim. Their entire faiths are built around it. Their cultures, their military structures, their sense of identity. So the war isn’t just territorial. It’s existential. If you stop fighting, you’re admitting that everything your people believed for a thousand years was wrong. That’s a harder thing to ask of someone than just laying down a sword.
The inspiration came from real history. Many of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in human history have had religion or ideology woven through them so deeply that the original cause gets buried under centuries of grievance and doctrine. I wanted to explore what happens when the thing both sides are fighting over turns out to be something neither side understood in the first place.
Theron carries a great deal of emotional weight throughout the story. What was most important to you when developing him as a reluctant warrior?
When we meet Theron, he’s not doing anything grand, and that was intentional. He’s wandering from village to village, feeding people who are starving, and asking for nothing in return. That was the foundation of his character for me. He’s not hiding because he’s afraid. He’s hiding because he failed, and penance is all he has left.
The most important thing was making sure his reluctance felt earned rather than passive. He doesn’t avoid the fight because he’s a coward. He avoids it because he knows exactly what it costs. He’s already paid that price once, and the world bled for it. So when he gets pulled back in, there’s this tension between a man who desperately wants to stay small and invisible, and a man who knows he might be the only one who can stop what’s coming. I didn’t want a brooding hero who sulks about his destiny. I wanted someone who had genuine reasons to stay away, and more importantly… genuine reasons he couldn’t.
The Stillight sits at the center of both faith and violence in the novel. How did you approach building its mystery and significance?
I knew from the beginning that the Stillight had to feel like something worth killing over. Not just politically, but spiritually. Both sides of this war have built entire belief systems around it, and if the reader doesn’t understand why, the conflict falls flat.
So I approached it in layers. On the surface, it’s a symbol of divine authority. Both humans and Sylphar look at it and see proof that their god or gods chose them. Beneath that, there are hints that the Stillight is doing something neither side fully grasps. And beneath that is the real truth, which I obviously won’t spoil here. But the key was making sure each layer felt complete on its own. A reader halfway through the book should somewhat feel like they understand what the Stillight is. A reader in the last chapter of the book should realize they were completely wrong. And a reader who has completely finished the book should understand that both sides were wrong from the very beginning. That line in the blurb on the back cover, “They were all deceived,” is the entire engine of the book.
A Shroud Undone has a bleak, grounded atmosphere where war feels exhausting rather than glorious. What themes do you hope readers take away from that portrayal?
I grew up on fantasy where battles were exciting and heroic, and I love those stories. But I wanted to write the version where you feel the mud and the fatigue and the weight of carrying a friend’s body off the field. War in this book is not glorious. It’s grinding and ugly and it breaks people in ways that don’t heal cleanly.
The theme I care about most is the cost of conviction. Every character in this book believes they’re doing the right thing, and most of them are paying for it with pieces of themselves. Theron is paying with years of guilt. Nyra is paying with the doubt that gnaws at her after every victory. The soldiers on both sides are paying with their lives for a war they inherited from people who are long dead. I want readers to walk away asking whether the causes we fight for are worth what we sacrifice to win them, and whether the people who started those fights had any right to ask that sacrifice of the generations that followed.
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For over a millennium, soldiers have died at the Mountain Temple, believing the Stillight—a divine flame of red and gold—demanded their sacrifice.
They were all deceived.
Theron hides in a forgotten village, feeding the starving and asking for nothing. Atonement is all he has left for the choices that shaped the war. But when battle erupts at the Mountain Temple once more, his past drags him back.
Nyra commands the Sylphar legions with ruthless precision. Total victory is the only answer. Failure is not permitted. But the orders she receives from the gods themselves make no sense—and obeying them may cost her everything.
When their paths collide beneath six empty thrones, they uncover a truth the gods never wanted revealed.
The war was never about territory. The gods aren’t distant. And the light everyone worships? It’s been lying from the beginning.
Stopping the war means confronting what keeps the world alive. And some truths don’t set you free—they doom you.
A dark epic fantasy for readers who crave:Morally complex characters with no easy answers
Magic systems with brutal consequences
Gods who lie, manipulate, and hide in plain sight
War portrayed with weight and cost, not glory
Plot twists that reframe everything you thought you knew
Freedom Boulevard
Freedom Boulevard, by Yusuf Blanton, is a raw, fast-moving novel about two people who arrive in Cordova looking for reinvention and instead find a city that tests every weak seam in their lives. Andy Blackwell comes west chasing music, nightlife, and queer belonging, admitting early on, “I was a rapper that yearned for recognition and a lost Queer in search of his proverbial tribe.” Sakeenah Bailey arrives with her own mix of fear, faith, ambition, and exhaustion, hoping the city might give her room to become someone new. Their stories unfold in alternating first-person chapters, giving the book the feel of two confessions running beside each other until their lives begin to rhyme in painful ways.
Cordova is the book’s real engine. Freedom Boulevard isn’t just a street full of clubs, motels, drugs, performers, creeps, hustlers, and neon. It’s a place that sells people the fantasy of freedom while charging them for every mistake they make. Blanton writes the city as a trap and a stage at the same time, where people come to be seen, to disappear, to make money, to get high, to pray, to perform, and to survive the night. The setting has a sweaty, lived-in quality, and the best scenes make you feel the cheap rooms, bad lighting, stale smoke, and nervous hope pressing in from every side.
Andy’s half of the novel follows an artist who wants recognition but keeps finding transactions where community should be. His world of clubs, promoters, hookups, landlords, clients, and empty promises is loud, funny, ugly, and increasingly dangerous. Sakeenah’s half is more inward but just as urgent. Her chapters wrestle with Islam, anxiety, family disappointment, weed, surveillance, abusive relationships, and the constant need to find shelter without losing herself. Together, they make the book feel less like a single plot and more like a map of two people trying to stay human in a city built to use them up.
Blanton’s style is big, profane, theatrical, and often funny in a bruised sort of way. The prose swings hard, sometimes piling image on image until the narration feels like a spoken-word performance, a panic attack, and a diary entry all at once. That intensity fits the characters, especially because both Andy and Sakeenah are trying to turn chaos into meaning. The book is full of sex, drugs, faith, poverty, ambition, and damage, but its deeper subject is storytelling itself: who gets reduced to a case file, who gets remembered, and who gets to turn pain into testimony.
Freedom Boulevard is a novel about survival as an act of authorship. Sakeenah’s journey gives the book its final shape, especially when she decides that “The pen was my new prayer mat and justice was my new singular aim.” That line captures what the novel is reaching for: not easy healing, but a way to make witness feel like purpose. It’s a harsh, messy, passionate book about people chasing freedom through places that rarely offer it cleanly, and it leaves behind the feeling of someone writing because silence would be another kind of death. I recommend this book to readers who like powerful, emotional stories about survival, resistance, and finding purpose through telling one’s truth.
Pages: 207 | ASIN : B0GSSR7FX4
The Kikiloa Chronicles
The Kikiloa Chronicles: Book One, by Erik D. Larson, is a young adult science fiction/fantasy adventure about Hazel, an ordinary San Francisco teen whose strange friend Kiki turns out to be anything but ordinary. Kiki is ancient, playful, wounded, and tangled in time, and she pulls Hazel, Lee, Peter, and others into a story that stretches from the present day to deep prehistory, Hawaiʻi, possible futures, and branching versions of reality. This is a genre-blending book about friendship, justice, choice, and whether love can still be love when it tries too hard to control the outcome.
What stood out to me first was the energy of the writing. Larson gives the book a quick, bright pulse. One moment, it feels like a teen adventure with jokes, awkward crushes, and friends trying to make sense of the impossible. The next, it opens wide into something much older and stranger, with scenes that move across oceans, extinction, violence, grief, and human history. Kiki’s voice is especially interesting because she can be funny and reckless on the surface, but underneath that spark is someone carrying an almost unbearable amount of memory. She’s charming, but she’s not simple. That made me keep watching her closely.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choices around power and responsibility. The time travel and multiverse elements are fun, but the book isn’t only interested in clever mechanics. It keeps circling back to moral questions. What does it mean to help someone? When does protection become manipulation? Can you claim to be acting out of love while taking away another person’s choice? Those ideas gave the story weight. The book takes big swings, moving from playful banter to deep reflection very quickly. For me, that ambition was part of the appeal. The story feels restless in a good way, like it’s always reaching for a larger pattern.
I would recommend The Kikiloa Chronicles: Book One to readers who enjoy young adult speculative fiction with time travel, found family, philosophical questions, and a strong emotional core. It’ll especially appeal to people who like science fiction and fantasy that mixes humor with heavier themes and doesn’t mind a story that asks them to think while the adventure is unfolding. It’s imaginative, sincere, and bigger on the inside than it first appears.
Pages: 401 | ASIN : B0GX314D3J
Sisters of the Reef
Sisters of the Reef by M. K. Aleja is a mythic fantasy rooted in CHamoru folklore, imagining the lost history behind a legend of a woman protected by sharks. The story follows Gåni, a makåna and healer on Tinian, whose bond with two reef sharks deepens after they save her from jellyfish and a dangerous current. What begins as an act of rescue becomes a sacred kinship between village and sea, until Spanish colonization ruptures that relationship and turns love, medicine, and memory into things that must survive in whispers.
I was most moved by the way the story treats the natural world not as scenery, but as family. The sharks are not cute companions or symbolic ornaments; they are beings with agency, dignity, and emotional presence. Their choice to keep the black and white markings on their fins feels mythic without feeling decorative. It carries the weight of a vow. Gåni’s reverence for them gives the story its strongest pulse, and the scenes where the village gathers to heal the injured sharks are tender in a way that feels almost ceremonial.
The second half struck me harder because the story refuses to let wonder remain untouched by history. The arrival of the Spanish soldiers changes the air of the book; the reef that once shimmered with reciprocity becomes a place of surveillance, fear, and blood. I appreciated that the violence is not included merely for shock. It shows how colonization does not only kill people; it severs knowledge, distorts language, and teaches later generations to distrust what once protected them. The final aquarium scene is quiet, but it lingers. It suggests that erased stories may not vanish completely, they wait for someone brave or old or ghostlike enough to tell them again.
Readers who enjoy mythic fantasy, folklore, Indigenous historical fantasy, eco-fantasy, and anti-colonial fiction will find a great deal to admire here. The book would appeal to readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, especially in its insistence that the world around us is not an object but a relative. Sisters of the Reef is a luminous reef-song about kinship, erasure, and the stubborn afterlife of memory.
Zara’s Gothic: A Thrilling Journey Into Adventure, Horror, Mystery, and Romance
Zara’s Gothic opens with a woman already half-shattered. Zara Wilander, a paramedic in upstate New York, is wrecked by guilt after a road accident kills a dog and nearly kills a pedestrian; when work, therapy, and ordinary housing all fail her, she ends up living in her handmade van on a secluded property dominated by a derelict Victorian house that seems less abandoned than watchful. From there, the novel widens from trauma narrative into Gothic haunting: a lonely, hyper-attuned protagonist, an eccentric real-estate man named Jenner Reid, and a decaying house whose pull may be supernatural, psychological, or some unnerving braid of both.
I found myself most taken with the book’s atmosphere and with the way it inhabits Zara’s consciousness. McRoberts doesn’t give her a clean, tasteful suffering; she gives her jagged perception, sensory overwhelm, intrusive memory, odd wit, and a genuine estrangement from the social world. That makes the novel feel intimate. The prose often leans baroque, but in this case, the excess is part of the weather system: rot creaks, trees thrum, sound wounds, silence has grain. When the book is working at full voltage, it feels less like reading a plot than like walking through a feverish interior architecture.
What I really liked, though, wasn’t just the haunted-house apparatus but the tenderness threaded through it. Zara’s bond with her van, her craftsmanship, her ache for solitude, and her unstable reliance on Jenner give the novel an emotional undercarriage sturdier than its melodrama. Some scenes sprawl, and some flourishes arrive in clusters. This book has a peculiar pulse. It wants grandeur, morbidity, vulnerability, and sentiment all at once, and more often than not, it earns that ambition.
I’d recommend Zara’s Gothic to readers of Gothic fiction, psychological horror, haunted-house novels, women-centered dark fiction, and literary supernatural suspense, or anyone who likes their genre work emotionally raw rather than mechanically slick. It reminded me, at moments, of Shirley Jackson by way of Mexican Gothic: not because it copies either, but because it understands that a house can become an accomplice to grief. This is a strange, bruised, haunted novel that turns damage into atmosphere and atmosphere into destiny.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0H6JL2WX7
Mine-Shift
Mine-Shift, by John Kitchen, is a time-slip adventure about Joel Penberthy, a teenage Cornish miner whose life is split between the brutal reality of the eighteenth century and the strange brightness of the twenty-first. Joel first stumbles into the future through an old mine passage, carrying with him fear, guilt, superstition, and a fierce loyalty to his injured father. His first clear reaction says a lot about the book’s heart: “I don’t belong here.” That feeling of being out of place drives the story, but so does Joel’s growing sense that belonging can change.
The novel is especially strong when it keeps Joel close to the physical world he knows. The mine is hot, dangerous, cramped, and full of old beliefs, while modern Cornwall feels almost magical through his eyes, with cars, phones, medicine, surfing, bright shops, and easy friendship. Kitchen gets a lot of mileage out of that contrast. The future isn’t treated as a joke or a simple rescue. It’s confusing, dazzling, and sometimes frightening, and Joel has to learn it piece by piece.
Joel’s friendships with Cass, Karl, and Ewan give the book much of its warmth. Cass is curious, bold, and kind, and her bond with Joel gives the story a tender pull without taking it away from adventure. Karl and Ewan help widen Joel’s world, while Dr Greaves brings practical hope through medicine. What’s nice is that these modern characters don’t just teach Joel things. They give him room to become more himself, and that makes his transformation feel earned.
At the same time, the story keeps one foot firmly in Joel’s old life. His father’s injury, Hab’s anger, the Pellar’s influence, and the suspicion of “black arts” create real pressure around every trip through the portal. Joel isn’t simply choosing between misery and comfort. He loves people on both sides of time, and that makes the ending land with a quiet sadness as well as relief. By the close, when Joel is described as “a twenty-first-century boy,” the line feels less like escape and more like the final shape of a hard choice.
Mine-Shift is a thoughtful adventure about courage, change, and the shock of seeing your own world from the outside. It blends Cornish mining history, folklore, friendship, and time travel into a story that feels accessible for older children while still carrying some emotional weight. Joel is easy to care about because he’s scared, stubborn, decent, and often overwhelmed, which makes his journey feel personal rather than merely fantastical.
Pages: 225 | ASIN : B0FP4C1DDY
Babies on Board Part 2 (A Grumpy the Iguana and Green Parrot Adventure)
Babies on Board Part 2, by Susan Marie Chapman, follows Grumpy the Iguana, Green Parrot, Mr. Squirrel, and Little Mouse as they return to the beach in the middle of the night to help a giant sea turtle’s babies make it safely to the ocean. What begins as a moonlit rescue mission becomes a gentle lesson about sea turtle hatchlings, artificial light, teamwork, and the quiet courage it takes to do the right thing when small lives are depending on you.
I liked how the story balances adventure with tenderness. There’s a real sweetness in watching these four friends hold hands in the dark, admit they’re scared, and still keep going. It’s such a small moment, but it says something lovely about bravery: children don’t have to be fearless to be helpful. The writing is simple and earnest, with bits of humor from Mr. Squirrel and Little Mouse that keep the story from feeling too serious. The book feels like it’s trying to comfort and teach at the same time, and mostly, it succeeds.
I appreciated that Chapman introduces children to sea turtle conservation without making the lesson feel cold or lecture-heavy. The danger of artificial lights confusing hatchlings is woven into the plot in a way that children can understand, and the instruction not to touch the baby turtles gives the story a nice sense of responsibility. Natalia Loseva’s artwork has a soft, hand-drawn charm that suits the nighttime setting beautifully. The deep blues, sandy browns, moonlit water, and tiny turtles create a calm, watchful mood. Some pages are sparse, but that openness works, especially when the beach feels wide and dark, and the baby turtles seem so small against it.
I found Babies on Board Part 2 to be a warm and thoughtful picture book with a sincere environmental message and a tender emotional core. It feels like the kind of children’s book I’d read aloud slowly at bedtime, letting my child linger over the moon, the ocean, and the little turtles finding their way home. I’d recommend it for young animal lovers, families who enjoy gentle adventure stories, and parents looking for a sweet way to start a conversation about helping wildlife and caring for the natural world.
Pages: 237 | ASIN : B09GV6TCNQ
