Dori Hillestad Butler returns to the children’s mystery genre with a brand-new easy reader series starring a lovable golden retriever who helps his human girl solve mysteries.  In the series’ inaugural title, King & Kayla and the Case of the Missing Dog Treats, precocious King helps his human friend Kayla sniff out clues on some treats gone missing. In Book Two, King & Kayla and the Case of the Secret Code, Kayla receives a letter in the mail written in code, along with her friend Mason, and King must help her find out who sent the letter!

Butler’s King & Kayla series boasts simple, straightforward language with a touch of deadpan humor—perfect for new readers who are full of curiosity and are eager to sniff out answers to their questions.  Kayla’s logical lists, as well as King’s canine assistance, is proof to children that they are capable of solving life’s little mysteries—with a little bit of help. Nancy Meyer’s endearing, full-color illustrations convey the affection between King and his human, even though she misunderstands him most of the time.

“Readers will connect with this charmingly misunderstood pup (along with his exasperated howls, excited tail wagging, and sheepish grins).” ―Kirkus Reviews

“A welcome addition to the beginning chapter book scene. Children will delight in Kayla and her dog King’s success in solving mysteries. They will also enjoy the humor found in both the text and illustrations, particularly King’s attempts to help Kayla.”―Diane Nielsen, PhD, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, University of Kansas

“Children will relate to the lovable and over enthusiastic character of King who pronounces every food and every activity as ‘his favorite.’ The owner, Kayla, tries hard to understand his various barks and actions which provides lots of age appropriate humor. These enjoyable stories will delight young readers and make their reading a pleasure.” ―Carla Morris, Theodore Seuss Geisel Committee Chair (2013)

This case-cracking dynamic duo opens investigations on March 1st, so be sure to track them down at your local library, indie bookstore, or Barnes & Noble.  If you do, you’re sure to be one of King’s new favorite things!

Dad, Jackie, and Me by Myron Uhlberg illustrated by Colin Bootman

It is the summer of 1947 and a highly charged baseball season is underway in New York. Jackie Robinson is the new first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers—and the first black player in Major League Baseball. A young boy shares the excitement of Robinson’s rookie season with his deaf father. Finally one day the father delivers some big news: they are going to Ebbets Field to watch Jackie play in person!

Sliding Into Home by Dori Hillestad Butler

It’s not fair! Thirteen-year-old Joelle Cunningham is passionate about baseball. She loves to watch it, read about it, and, most of all, play it. But when her family moves from Minneapolis to the small town of Greendale, Iowa, she quickly discovers that there are strict rules preventing her from playing on the school baseball team. Author Dori Butler has created a high-spirited, indomitable character that young girls will admire and root for in this story of frustrated ambition and ultimate triumph.

Stumptown Kid by Carol Gorman & Ron J. Findley

Twelve-year-old Charlie Nebraska wants two things he can’t get: to make the local Wildcats Baseball team and to have life to return to the way it was before his father died two years earlier in the Korean War. Then Charlie meets Luther Peale, a former Negro Baseball League player, and the two strike up a friendship that is challenged by some of the small town’s residents. This dramatic and moving story set int he days of the Negro Leagues illustrates the true meanings of friendship, prejudice, and heroism.

Dugout Rivals by Fred Bowen

Jake Daley loves baseball. He loves playing for the Red Sox in the Woodside baseball league. He loves playing short stop. Most of all, he loves to win. When newcomer Adam joins the team and showcases his outstanding skills by winning game after game, Jake begins to wonder if he or the other players even matter. It’s only when Jake learns of Babe Ruth and the 1927 Yankees that he realizes even the best players rely on the talent of their teammates.

The Golden Glove by Fred Bowen

Without his lucky glove, Jamie doesn’t believe in his ability to lead his baseball team to victory. After losing his special glove before the season’s opening game, he is disappointed in his performance with the glove he had to borrow. But with the help of a sporting goods store owner and former minor league player, Jamie learns that faith in oneself is the most important equipment for any game.

The Kid Coach by Fred Bowen

Baseball season is underway, and Coach Skelly has just quit. When Scott and his teammates can’t find an adult to coach the team, it looks as if the Tigers’ season might be over before it really begins. But then the players have an idea: what if one of them became coach? They learn about leadership and discover unique and unrecognized talents among their own friends.

Perfect Game by Fred Bowen

Isaac is determined to pitch a perfect game: no hits, no runs, no walks, and no errors. If he does, he’s sure to make the summer all-star team. But Isaac keeps losing his cool on the mound; he just can’t get his head back in the game. Then he meets a very interesting Unified Sports basketball player who gets him thinking in a different way about the whole idea of “perfect.”

Playoff Dreams by Fred Bowen

Brendan is one of the best players in the league, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make his team win. After an unexpected event and learning the story of Cubs player and Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, Brendan realizes that it’s the love of the game that makes the experience a success.

T.J.’s Secret Pitch by Fred Bowen

T.J. is smaller than his teammates and his pitches just don’t have the power to get the batters out. When he learns about 1940s player Rip Sewell, he may have found a solution. But will his teammates give T. J. a chance to prove that he can be a pitcher? And will T. J.’s secret pitch help lead his team to victory?

Throwing Heat by Fred Bowen

Last season, Jack’s pitches were the fastest around, and he could always rely on them to strike out his opponents. But now he’s playing in a new middle school league, where the distance between the pitching rubber and the catcher’s mitt is a lot greater. Jack keeps throwing heat but he can’t get seem to get balls into the strike zone. When a local college baseball coach offers to help him, Jack doesn’t listen at first, but with the season on the line, he realizes the coach was right. Is it too late to change his game plan?

Winners Take All by Fred Bowen

In order to win an important baseball game, twelve-year-old Kyle claims to have made a difficult catch, which he actually dropped. The attention he receives is not enough to silence his conscience. When Kyle learns of Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, a pitcher whose reputation for honesty was so great that umpires would ask him to make calls during games, he realizes that being a hero is only worthwhile if you have earned it.

Look for these books and more at your local library, indie bookstore, or Barnes & Noble.

Myron Uhlberg

Myron: My mother and father were deaf.  Born hearing, I was their first child.  My first language was sign language, a language not of speech but of signs made with the hands, supplemented by the grammar of the face and body.  From the earliest age, I felt no space existed between me and my mother and father.  But at an early age my father asked me to be his ears and voice in the world of sound: my world, but a world as foreign to him as the moon was to me.  With this request I stopped being a child, and overnight was forced to confront my parents’ world—a world of absolute silence.

This period of my life—being my father’s ears and voice—opened the door to the world of the deaf, the world of eternal silence. That experience made me the young man I was to become, and the man I am today.  One day, long after they had died, I felt compelled to write about my parents’ world, a world unseen (deafness is not visible) where communication and understanding takes many different forms.

Ted Papoulas

Being a big fan of Brooklyn, where I lived for most of my life, the opening two pieces—the scene overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge in the morning and the painting of the family catching the trolley with Ebbets Field in the background—were enjoyable to create. They were also the first two images completed, which brought the project from a purely conceptual state into tangible reality and that’s always an exciting moment. I also really enjoyed painting the crowded Boardwalk scene. Who cannot be happy while thinking about Coney Island?

I was a little concerned with the Chinese restaurant interior before tackling that piece but it turned out to be a nice change of pace from the exteriors and one of my favorite paintings. My hope is that readers of the book will have their own preferences and each painting will be somebody’s favorite image.

Myron: I wrote The Sound of All Thingsto bring to the attention of hearing children (and their parents and educators) the world of the Deaf—a world of silence, in plain sight, but invisible, among the larger world of ceaseless sound.

In doing so, I hoped to generate both thought and discussion about the means of communication used in both worlds—aural speech for the hearing, Sign Language for the Deaf—and the power that one’s language has in the development of one’s perception and accommodation to the world one lives in.

The Sound Of All Things, as well as some of my previous books, attempts to shine a light on the Deaf world—from the fact of its very existence, to the challenges it presents to its inhabitants, and on to its common language. Communication for the Deaf is a most human language of the hands, the face and the body—a language of signs, gestures, and expressions as visually beautiful and expressive as a spoken Shakespearean play.

Ultimately, my story is a celebration of the beautiful ways in which all of humanity coexists in this shared beautiful world we all live in, bound by the cords of familial love and the common language used to express that love.

Ten years ago, on August 28, 2005, like millions of Americans around the country, I sat glued to my television screen as a monster hurricane came barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico.

I grew up in Brooklyn, barely two miles from Coney Island and the surly Atlantic Ocean. In those pre-electronic days of no TV (let alone computers, iPhones, and IPads), life seemed fairly dull. But one wild September day, when I was eleven years old, the Great Atlantic hurricane of 1944 hit land just east of Brooklyn. I remember holding my coat open, being swept up and down my street by winds that were later reported to be over 100 miles per hour.

Ever since that day in my childhood, hurricanes had held for me an odd fascination. I had begun following the path of Katrina as it approached the southernmost coast of Florida on August 2. At that time the storm was seemingly on a collision course with Aventura, a city founded by Don Soffer, a friend and football teammate from my Brandeis University days. My first girlfriend, whom I’d met as a freshman at Brandeis, also lived in Aventura. This hurricane was personal.

Katrina passed over south Florida, causing considerable damage. With much of her energy spent, she limped, like a dowager in high heels, into the Gulf of Mexico.

However, within a matter of hours, fed by the warm waters of the Gulf, Katrina regained her strength, flexed her muscles, and headed west. The guessing game began: When would she turn toward land? Where would she hit? The Florida panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or perhaps even as far west as Texas?

Anyone who watched the course of that storm over the next two days will remember how Katrina finally made up her mind and hooked to her right, northwards. The suspense ended as it became obvious that she was headed straight for New Orleans—a man-made, crescent-shaped city built on reclaimed land, much of it below sea level, surrounded by two lakes, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico.

Who can forget the images we saw on our TV screen? Winds up to 140 miles per hour and rain falling with biblical intensity. The mighty Mississippi River, one of the largest and most powerful rivers in the world, being pushed backwards, upstream, like a mere puddle. And then the canals overflowing, the levees collapsing, and New Orleans being inundated.

Whole sections of the city had been reduced to roofs poking up like tiny islands in a new lake. And on the roofs were people, in plain sight but apparently ignored. That image struck me. In that moment, those people were experiencing the reality that my deaf parents lived with many times—in plain sight but ignored by the hearing. I couldn’t get that actual, as well as metaphorical, relationship from my mind’s eye. Yet how easy it was, at the end of the day, to click off our TV sets, and as the screen went dark, to turn our back on what we had witnessed.

Over the course of the next three days, I watched the horror of what Katrina—and years of neglect and indifference—had spawned. New Orleans was drowning right before our eyes.

And where were the children?

• During the following year I was obsessed with Hurricane Katrina and the answer to that question: what had happened to the children of Katrina? I read the statistics:
• Katrina had flooded over 80 percent of New Orleans.
• One million people—men, women and children—were driven from their homes.
• 20,000 people sought refuge in the Superdome; 76 percent had children under 18 with them.
• “Refuge” in the Superdome meant living for days hungry, thirsty, half-dressed, with garbage piled high and the bathrooms turned putrid.
• Three months after Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans, the waters had receded, but according to Newsday, “1,300 children were still missing.”

Every one of my children’s books have started with some aspect of my life, lived as the hearing child of two deaf parents. What I witnessed on TV that August, and later researched in newspapers, books, and websites—the words and the photos—brought to my mind the powerlessness, the confusion, the terror, the uncertainty, and the need for adult reassurance that all the children of Katrina must have experienced, as I had experienced at various times in my young life, and as all children experience at some point.

I was compelled to write the story of one such child of Katrina—a boy who loved his parents and depended on them to see him through any situation—and the story of his parents, who provided him with the love, protection, and hope for the future that we trust all parents will offer to their children.

I thought for a long time about my fictional character, Louis Daniel, and his strong, protective, and loving parents. Then as I wrote about them, they became real to me. I could have been that boy; those could have been my parents. We could have experienced what they experienced. Just as my parents had chosen always to see hope for our family, so Louis Daniel’s parents saw hope for theirs.

Once the book was written, I felt I could say no more. Then I considered who might be best to illustrate Louis Daniel’s story. Who could feel what Louis Daniel felt? Who could express artistically what this boy and his family went through during this horrendous life-altering event?

I visited New Orleans for the first time in 2006, less than one year after Hurricane Katrina. I was there for the American Library Association convention. Illustrator Colin Bootman and I were to receive the ALA Schneider Family Book Award for Dad, Jackie, and Me, a book we’d worked on together. We had never met. But I felt, in a way, that I knew Colin. His artistic interpretation of my deaf father in that story was so emotionally accurate, he might very well had known him.

I had brought the manuscript of Louis Daniel and hurricane Katrina to the convention. My thought was to show it to Margaret Quinlin—the president and publisher of Peachtree Publishers—who would join us in accepting the award.

Prior to the awards ceremony, I saw the Superdome and visited the Ninth Ward. What I saw on those visits and the emotions they triggered have remained with me to this day, nine years later.

Finally, at a luncheon in honor of the Schneider family award recipients, I met Colin Bootman. We—a kid from Brooklyn and a boy born in Trinidad—hit it off immediately. The next day we met for coffee in my hotel’s lobby, and he asked me what we could do as a follow-up to our collaborative award-winning book. I told him that I had been working on a story about a family from the Ninth Ward who had been caught in Hurricane Katrina.

“Tell me more,” he said. And I did, laying out the entire incredible story of Louis Daniel and his family’s escape from the rising floodwaters, and their subsequent misery during their stay in the Superdome.

Colin listened with rapt attention. When I was finished, he only asked me one question: “How do you visualize the boy, Louis Daniel?” I described a ten-year-old boy who loved playing his cornet, just as Louis Armstrong had done many years before him, when he was a boy living in New Orleans.

“I want to do this book!” Colin said. “I know this boy. How long will it take to write?”

“I already wrote it.”

“When can I read it?”

“Now,” I said, and went up to my room to get the manuscript.

Colin Bootman’s art for this book was beyond my greatest expectations; he captured Louis Daniel perfectly. And his cover art showing Louis under a blue cloudless sky, joyously blowing his cornet on a flooded street in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, was breathtaking. It was all there: catastrophe, the aftermath, life continuing, and the miracle of hope.

It has often been said, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But in the case of A Storm Called Katrina, I believe you can.

As an American History major in college, I was taken with Gore Vidal’s shorthand description of America. He called it “The United States of Amnesia.”

I’ve just turned 82, and often reflect on how much America, and life lived in America, has changed since I was a boy. So much has happened—a series of brutal wars, growing economic inequality, continuing struggles for human rights, increasing dependence on lightning-fast electronic communication and quick sound bites at the expense of building deep commitments and personal relationships. All this does seem to have resulted in a mind-numbing national amnesia.

In writing a story about what happened to a family in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, I hoped to suggest that there was still time to recover, to see the light of what’s truly important in America: family, community, shared purpose, and hope for a better future for everyone.

Whether I succeeded or not, I will always treasure the time I spent in the effort.