Bella Brown Meets Pip the Domovoi follows a curious girl and a mischievous household spirit as they race to recover a magical key before sunrise and protect a hidden world from a dangerous sorcerer. What inspired you to introduce young readers to the Slavic folklore surrounding domovoi?

I grew up listening to my grandmother’s bedtime stories about Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless, the Domovoi, and other Slavic fairy tales and folklore.

It was only after I grew up, had my own family, and served in the military around the globe that I discovered my grandmother hadn’t shared these stories. Not with my mother, my aunt, my uncles, my cousins, or any of my siblings. No one but me.

Only after one too many deployments did I realize I had never passed any of my grandmother’s bedtime stories on to my own son. By then, he was too old for them.

All the tales my grandmother had carried across the ocean lived with me alone now, and I knew they couldn’t end with me. That is why I weave Slavic mythology and folklore into all of my stories: to honor my grandmother, our ancestors, and our culture.

Why did you choose an ordinary family home as the setting for Bella and Pip’s magical adventure?

Because a domovoi is found in our homes. In Slavic folklore, a domovoi is a family ancestor, the original owner of the house, who has become its guardian spirit. He lives behind the stove or within the hearth, quietly watching over the family. Setting this adventure anywhere but an ordinary family home would break the very folklore the story is built on.

Magic is also everywhere.

The best stories often begin at home. And part of the fun is discovering that the creak of an old house, a rattling tea tin, or the gap behind the refrigerator might be where the magic has been hiding all along. A child can close this book, look around their own living room, and wonder.

What was the collaborative process like when creating Pip’s transformations and the book’s visual details?

The collaborative process involves the author, editor, illustrator, and book designer, all in different phases.

The first phase of collaboration is with a children’s book editor.

All of my manuscripts go through three rounds of edit-reviews, mine with Marcy Pusey of Miramare Ponte Press. This helps craft the best written version of the story, which is essential before the manuscript is ever sent to the illustrator.

In the second phase, the ready-to-publish manuscript goes to the illustrator.

Because text and dialogue don’t always convey the emotional context or the author’s vision for a scene, I share both through Illustrator’s Notes that appear at the top of each scene. The notes are set in a different color from the text and dialogue, usually blue or grey, and framed in brackets, like this: [Illustrator’s Note: ].

These notes are never used to tell the artist how to draw. They exist to share the author’s vision for the scene: the setting, the lighting, the character’s body language, the time of day or night, the season, and the emotion I want a reader to feel.

For example, the note for the opening scene reads, in part:

“Warm amber lamplight from a table lamp near the bed creates an intimate glow on Grandma and Bella, while the rest of the room fades into softer twilight shadows… Mood: Safe, warm, intimate, the moment before magic begins.”

From there, my illustrator, Anastasiia, brings her own artistry to life in Pip’s transformations, such as when his nervous shape-shifting misfires and he looks like a skinny tree with hairy arms and a little tail. And he’s so nervous, he lets out a “toot,” seen as an onomatopoeia word surrounded by a puff of glitter dust. That gag lives where my vision and Anastasiia’s art meet.

The third phase is one part of the process readers don’t usually see, where the manuscript isn’t always the final word.

Once the book designer, Nuno, lays every illustration against its text, it sometimes becomes clear that a line of dialogue can be tightened or reworked to fit the finished art even better. So a few small tweaks appear in the published book that weren’t in the original manuscript, the result of the words and the pictures being fitted together until the whole spread sings.

Where the book designer becomes indispensable is when a finished file reveals a problem I hadn’t caught. Such as with this story: I never grounded readers in who the antagonist, Sinti, is before Pip mentions him. This meant his name carries little or no weight, when it should.

How did I see or realize this? The first spread, a beautiful illustration of Grandma Yetta reading her Slavic mythology book, had no text or dialogue. Seeing it finished but missing any text or dialogue felt wrong, as if something was missing.

I was ready to delete the page, because anything that doesn’t move the story forward should be cut.

That wordless illustration got me to re-read the whole story, and that’s when I realized Sinti arrives as a threat before the reader knows who he is. Doh.

Rather than cut the page, I used it to solve the problem. I gave Grandma Yetta a line that grounds Sinti right at the start:

“Bella soaked up every word Grandma Yetta read about the domovoi’s centuries-old fight against the no-good, no-heart, double-rotten, bumbling bungler of bunglers, the evil immortal sorcerer Sinti, obsessed with finding a way into the domovoi’s world to steal their magic and destroy them all.”

Now the empty page earns its place, and Sinti carries real weight the moment Pip says his name.

What do you hope children learn from Bella and Pip about courage, mistakes, and responsibility?

Courage can be as simple as giving yourself permission to do what has to be done, even when you’re scared or trying something for the first time.

And mistakes happen. Sometimes we trip or drop something and make a mess. Some messes we can handle on our own. We can wipe up a spilled drink with a paper towel, sweep spilled cereal into a dustpan, pick our clothes up off the floor, make our bed, or put away our toys. But some jobs are too big to handle alone. If there’s ever a flood or a fire, the responsible thing is to tell a grown-up right away, so the mess can be cleaned up safely. Part of growing up is learning the difference.

Beyond that, I wanted children to think about time and consequences. That’s why a digital clock appears in scenes throughout the book, and as the story unfolds, the time creeps closer and closer to sunrise. Many children are learning how to tell time, but they aren’t always shown why time matters. In this story, if Bella and Pip don’t find Papa Pip’s key before sunrise, the sorcerer Sinti could slip into the domovoi world and steal all its magic.

This allowed Anastasiia to show readers the rising stakes, in Bella and Pip’s faces and body language, right alongside that ticking clock. Showing consequences in action is so much more powerful than telling a child to hurry up or clean their room. This story lets them feel it.

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