320 Sycamore Studios is a different kind of children’s book publisher. We share serialized stories via our weekly newsletter, host a read-aloud community, and offer free PDF versions of all the books we sell. Enjoy!

Heya <<First Name>>,

It’s the summer of 2019.

My two almost-grown children and I are road-tripping from Seattle down through the Intermountain West.

I’ve got a rental car, which means they can’t drive.

This will be important later.

Midway through our trip, we’re headed from Great Basin National Park to central Utah.

Empty miles unspool.

And we are wonderstruck at the unpeopled vistas.

Photo by Daniel Cartin on Unsplash.

Then my daughter announces that she needs to be back home a day earlier than we planned.

She misread her work schedule.

We’re bound for Escalante, a little oasis in the middle of a bazillion canyons that just cry out to be explored.

It’s meant to be the highlight of the trip.

I’d wanted to save to the best for last.

Now I’ve got a dilemma.

One, I can cut the trip short. We’ll miss out on a couple hikes, but I’ll be able to break the drive into two manageable segments.

Two, I can cannonball it back to Seattle in one day. Which is 1,150 miles of interstate.

I decide to cannonball it.

And thanks to Frederik Backman (and an ungodly amount of coffee), the drive goes … great.

Backman is the author of “A Man Called Ove,” a book we start listening to once the kids are both awake, somewhere along I-15 south of Fillmore, Utah.

Ove is our fourth passenger that day. Mile after mile, chapter after chapter, hour after hour after hour. Ove keeps us entertained, awake, and peaceable. Through Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

17 hours and 34 minutes later, we pull into Seattle, a weary, tight-knit tribe.

Thanks, Ove.

Reading aloud really does give you superpowers.

Happy reading.

Jeff and Bob …
… who believe that reading with kids can change the world for the better

PS. We bid farewell this week to our wingwoman, Zoe, who’s dialing back her work schedule for health reasons. She is a gem of a human and we will miss her.

Our latest read-aloud continues …

A zombie birthday specialty. (Illustration by Madeline Barber.)

The past few weeks, we’ve been telling the story “Scar and the Wolf,” complete with new illustrations.

We’ll officially publish “Scar” this fall, along with the second book in the series, “Moldylocks and the Bear.” But for now (and always) you can read it free on our Storyblog.

“Scar and the Wolf” is an early-grade chapter book. It’s basically “Red Riding Hood” as a lovable zombie girl. And, I hope, it’s more than that. Beyond having fun with the premise, I wanted to dig into the ways we transition out of childhood and begin to grow up.

This week, Scarlet escapes from a dark, squishy place. Oh, and there’s an escape.

Here’s an excerpt:

Scarlet, returning from the kitchen with a massive tray of sliced, raw mondo-haggis, paused to look around Grandma’s living room. For the first time in her undeath, she felt like she was seeing zombies for who they were, not as what they were wearing. And the zombies she saw were kind, surly, funny, boring, irascible, stubborn, joyous, and for the most part, a mix of all of those things and more.

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