The Reedy List

My son had a best friend in first grade who moved away mid-year. He did not talk about it much. He was six and did not yet have the language for grief or loss or the particular loneliness of a desk that used to belong to someone you liked. But I could see it in him — a quietness that had not been there before, a reluctance to invest in new friendships that might also disappear. We were reading together one evening — a picture book about a character who had been left behind, who did not understand why the world had rearranged itself without asking permission — and my son looked up from the page and said "that's how I feel about Timmy." He could not have said it directly. He had tried and the words had not come. But the character found them for him. That moment is the one I return to every time someone asks me why I write fantasy for children. Not because fantasy is escapism — though it can be — but because the right story creates exactly enough distance from a child's ...

 There was a period when my son would come home from school and I could tell within thirty seconds how his day had gone. Not from what he said. From his body. The set of his shoulders. Whether he dropped his bag by the door or threw it. Whether he came to find me or went straight to his room and closed the door behind him. He was in second grade and struggling with reading comprehension — and what I did not fully understand then, but understand completely now, is that the academic struggle and the emotional struggle were the same struggle. He was not just falling behind in reading. He was falling behind in his belief that he was capable. That he belonged. That the classroom was a safe place for someone like him. He did not need more reading exercises after school. He needed somewhere to land first. We did not call it a calm corner. We called it his spot. A particular chair by the window, a particular blanket, a small basket of things that helped — a smooth stone he liked to hol...

When my son was in second grade his teacher called me in for a meeting. He was struggling. Not because he wasn't trying — he was trying harder than anyone in that classroom. But reading comprehension was genuinely difficult for him, and the gap between what he understood and what the assessments expected was widening every semester. What I noticed — and what nobody talked about enough at the time — was that his reading struggles and his emotional struggles were the same struggle wearing different clothes. When he felt confused he shut down. When he felt behind he stopped trying. When the words on the page felt like they were working against him, his whole sense of himself as a learner quietly started to erode. That experience sent me on a years-long journey into how children's emotional lives and their academic lives connect — and it is ultimately what led me to create The Grumble Toad Adventures. Because I wanted to build a world where children who struggle feel seen rather th...