Helene Debelak is a writer, poet, and passionate children's book advocate from Cleveland, Ohio. In 1984, she and her husband co-founded an independent private school where she helped to develop a dyna...

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Reading is fun and it can also impact your wellbeing

Oh, preschoolers are fun. They've got OPINIONS and FACTS (about dinosaurs and firetrucks and Disney characters) and THINGS TO TELL YOU. They can handle more complicated storylines, where the action doesn't all happen on the page or in the words. Stories can be more nuanced, the jokes less obvious. But still, they're young, so attention spans are short. We don't need paragraphs of text - 3 or 4 sentences a page, max. But their eyes can find more details in illustrations and so the stories are eve

A sensational sleigh ride; joyous poetry; amazing animals; a sinister seaside town; a deadly forest; a thrilling heist and more I Am Cat by Jackie Morris, Otter-Barry, £20 A ginger cat curls up “ammonite tight” and dreams of ranging the Earth as tiger,…

ALT: a penguin is reading a comics magazine on a chimney

We write. We submit. We wait. And wait. And wait. It doesn’t take long for most kid-lit writers to learn (in the words of the late, great Tom Petty) “The waiting is the hardest part.” But does it h…