And now for something a little different: an award winning chapter book series has a new release!

Kari Allen is an elementary teacher at a local independent school where every day she gets to share stories with kids. She has an MA in the Teaching of Writing and one of her favorite things is to help kids fall in love with words. Kari feels happiest with her toes in the water and a book in her hand. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two book-loving boys. You can learn more about her at her website or follow her on Instagram or Substack.

MADDIE & MABEL are an early reader series about two sisters. This is an incredibly sweet series that has received starred reviews, the Junior Library Guild Gold Standard award, and has been a Cybils finalist in the Chapter book series. MADDIE & MABEL MAKE A FRIEND is the sixth book in this series published by Kind World Publishing. Here these sisters who are best friends meet a new neighbor. While the older sister clicks better with the new friend, the younger sibling is jealous and feels she is being replaced. Did I mention that this series is sweet? There’s no lashing out or revenge here with these emotions. There’s just a quiet withdrawal. The relationship between the two main characters is front and center for the whole series. These characters are very memorable and realistic.

ALSO of note: Kari will be doing a webinar for SCBWI on Chapter Books and Early Readers tomorrow. I’m not sure if registration is still open as of this posting, but check and see if it is (if you want to learn more about writing books like this).

Welcome Kari!

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about your writing journey? What brought you to this book?

Kari: I have always loved books (like I think most writers do)! When I was in college, I took a Children’s Literature course and fell in love with children’s books specifically. I started building my collection soon after by visiting the used bookstore in the town where my college was. After I started teaching, I started seeing firsthand the gigantic impact that books have on kids. I got involved with my state’s chapter of the National Writing Project where I wrote a piece for a course I was taking and my professor’s feedback was, “I think this is children’s book” and she sent me a link to a writing contest (that I applied for and lost)!  I think that’s when the idea really started to root.

When I had my first child, I began to wonder what if I actually pursued this dream. I started searching for writing conferences while googling “how to be a children’s writer” late at night when my baby wasn’t sleeping. I attended my first conference when he was six months old, and I began to learn about writing for kids. I went to conferences, took classes, read, and wrote. Most importantly, I kept trying. This did not happen overnight for me. It took six years before I got my agent and another year and a half after that before we sold anything. My first book came out in 2022, and I’ve had ten books published in the last three years. I won’t have ten more in the next three though and that’s okay. Every part of this journey is different, and I have learned something valuable from each step.

Q: I love Maddie & Mabel! They’re so adorable and realistic. What inspired their characters?

Kari: The first version of Maddie and Mabel was written for a class I took at Grub Street in Boston. When I first set out to write an early reader, I knew that I wanted it to be about two sisters. I have a younger sister and our relationship has always been one of the most important things in my life. Where we lived, there were no other kids around most of the year, it was just us. Many of the Maddie and Mabel stories are based on things we did or had happen to us, obviously with tweaks and changes! I also get inspiration from my students and my own children. I’ll hear something or see something and think “Hmmmmm that might be a good seed for a Maddie and Mabel story.” My advice is to collect everything, you never know when or how you might be able to use an idea. 

Me: This is an early reader series.  Can you talk about what it takes to make an episodic early reader with chapters? Is that vastly different from writing some of the other genres you’ve written (i.e., board books or picture books, etc.)?

Kari: In some ways yes, and in some ways no! To me, early readers are like picture books or board books because every word really does matter. They are different though when it comes to plotting as each book in the series has five mini-stories. To write these, I had a theme or scenario in mind for each book. Then I would craft the chapters, each with their own narrative arc in addition to the overall arc of the book. These smaller arcs had to tie together somehow. I would play with the order of the chapters and think about where which one worked best. I would also sometimes pull a story out and save it for another one of the books if it was not quite working where it was. Somewhere I have a file of Maddie and Mabel stories that did not make it into any of the books!

Me: I love that this book is perfect for kindergarteners OR first graders (i.e., readers just learning to read on their own).  It is easy to read.  Did you have to work hard to make sure the text wasn’t too difficult?  Did you have an editor help with the reading level of your vocabulary?

Kari: I thought a lot about word choice and readability when I was revising. For my “day job” I am a second-grade teacher, so have watched kids learn to read for over a decade. This definitely helped me as I was working on these books. I did not work from a word list or a scope and sequence but instead would think about word patterns and if I used one, tried to work it in again somewhere else. I thought about repetition so that kids would get extra practice decoding certain words. If I had used a word that would be difficult for a kid to decode, during the revision process I would go back and try to make a better word choice (one where I knew my second graders would have been taught a specific word pattern or sound). Sometimes simpler really is better.

Me: This is the sixth book in your series. Will there be more? Will we get to see more of Maddie and Mabel (and hopefully Max)?

Kari: As of right now, this is the last one! (Although I will never say never!) I wanted the series to feel authentic and not feel too repetitive. It’s hard to think of new ideas and new situations for the characters! I feel really proud of where we’ve left it and how the series turned out. I hope it will be something that readers will want to go back to, even as they grow up, because Maddie and Mabel (and Max) are their friends too.  

Me: The illustrations by Tatjana Mai-Wyss are wonderful. I love the softness of them and all the adorable elements she includes, while leaving plenty of white space. Any favorite illustrations in this book? Any illustration surprises?

Kari: I’m so glad you asked about Tatjana’s illustrations. I love them so much. Her illustrations were always exactly what the books needed to give them that little special something. One of my favorite things is that she somehow always adds something that is meaningful to me somehow without even knowing it. It’s that magic that happens when you work with an illustrator, I think.

In Maddie and Mabel Take the Lead, the girls split a cookie, and it happened to be the same kind of cookie my grandfather used to buy for me when I was little. The girls build blanket forts like my sister, and I used to. And in Maddie and Mabel Make a Friend, Max has a stuffed crocodile exactly like my son had. It’s things like this that just make her illustrations all the more special to me. I love how they feel timeless and fresh at the same time.

My favorite illustrations in this one might be when the girls are making something for their new neighbors and Mabel is half in their craft box looking for supplies. Because of course she would dive right into it! Or maybe the spread where the girls are looking at their baby pictures and laughing. I can’t pick; I love them all!

Me: Any advice for writers who might be interested in writing early readers?

Kari: My biggest advice is to read them! Go to a bookstore or the library and pull books off the shelf to see what is out there. There are all different kinds of early readers out there and it is important to know what is being published nowadays. And to play! Early readers are a lot of fun to create. You can play with dialogue, repetition, and your characters.  A lot can happen in the revision process, so dive in and do not stress out about format and language, you can fix all of that when you revise!

That is great advice Kari. Thank you for stopping by my blog today.

Dear readers, this book was published at the beginning of May. If you want to learn more about early readers, this is a great series to track down. It keeps the word choice simple, the characters are well rounded, and the illustrations are soft and fit wonderfully well with the text. You won’t want to miss them.