Book Series for Early Teens Aims to Change the World

Hillary and Malibug Beach: Mixed Media
(The Adventures of Hillary the Little Ladybug)

Can a children’s book series change the world? It just might be happening right now, with the popular series featuring Hillary the Little Ladybug, who debuted in early February of 2017. She’s had a great many adventures since then, and the 16^th book in the series – Hillary and Malibug Beach – has just been released.

Co-authored by William Dandurand, Elisabeth Revel and Mary Cohen, the illustrated books explore climate change and other topics in stories aimed at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students. All proceeds from sales of the “Ladybug” books benefit Mother Nature Festival Live Inc., which endeavors to stop harmful climate change.

In the latest story, strange things happen that alter everything for the ladybugs. A comet explodes, and the green glow causes mutations among them. Hillary sees mermaids and vampires. The vampires try to bite Hillary and turn her into a vampire.

The King orders all castle workers back to the castle, and the family must leave their vacation early. Hillary ends up back home in her bed but has strange dreams. Oh well, tomorrow will be another day. Hillary says her night prayers with her mom and falls into a restful sleep.

Some familiar figures have appeared in the Hillary the Ladybug series, such as Bigfoot, Donald Trumpbird, Tiny Tim and the King. Hillary’s own name sounds a bit like a famous person who has expressed concerns about climate change.

The series features original illustrations, photography and playfully educational storylines to tell adventurous children’s tales from the perspective of a precocious ladybug.

A team of authors and illustrators have collaborated on this now-16-book series, including Mary Cohen, Elisabeth Revel, Gary Revel, Naomi Kiber and William Dandurand, whose grandfather, Ray Lowe, worked for Disney.

In previous episodes of the Hillary the Ladybug saga, our heroine has solved the mystery of the secret cave, found herself in a post-nuclear world, joined the crew on a submarine, faced giant sharks, encountered a haunted castle, met the king of England, imagined herself as a queen, learned a valuable life lesson from a Praying Mantis and, in this new book, deals with challenges during a vacation with her family to Malibug Beach (no, not Malibu Beach, don’t be silly!). 

The original illustration of Hillary the Little Ladybug was created by American-born Gary Revel Jr., a 2006 Finnish Star Winner who lived in Finland for 16 years. Revel Jr. has received acclaim for his singing, dancing and acting in Finland and Hollywood, California.  

“The Adventures of Hillary the Little Ladybug is in development at Jongleur Pictures LLC for the making of an animated series to be produced by Jeff Olm,” says Gary Revel. “Jeff has been on the film-making team of many top-grossing films over the last 20 years. These include Titanic, The Revenant, Shrek Forever After, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and many more.”

The Adventures of Hillary the Little Ladybug series is also a fundraising project for Mother Nature Festival Live Inc. For more about how this book is helping to stop global warming, go to the website https://mothernaturefestival.live and you can learn how to participate in the mission of stopping global warming.

Jongleur Books publishes other William Dandurand-authored books, including ABC Owl: Who Are You, Lochy the Loch Ness Monster, Harry the Fairy, Global Warming A to Z, Halloween A to Z, California Girls A – Z, Treasure Stories Told by My Grandfather and Hillary and the Haunted Castle. The publishing company’s backlist includes over 70 books, novels and chapter books from over 20 authors and illustrators.   

For more information about how the Hillary the Little Ladybug series is helping to stop global warming, go to the website https://mothernaturefestival.live and you can learn how to participate in the mission of stopping global warming.

Also visit https://garyrevel.com/book/, or follow the publisher
on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jongleurbooks. 

The Adventures of Hillary the Little Ladybug 
is available from
Amazon.com
ISBN-13: 979-8836528768

Book Promo ~ Journey Through Fire and Ice

This is No Fairy Tale:
Newlyweds Face Happiness and Heartache During Alaskan Adventure

Journey Through Fire and Ice: Shattered Dreams Above the Arctic Circle is Deanne’s unforgettable memoir that gives new life to vivid memories that at one time she had hoped would fade.

It all began in the summer of 1964, when, at the age of 23, Deanne accompanied Tiger to the Inuit village of Kivalina, Alaska, a barrier island 23 miles above the Arctic Circle. Tiger was conducting a study of the natives, but Deanne, a naïve city girl, was completely unprepared for what she was about to experience.

In Kivalina, she lived on the edge of two worlds — the one she left behind and the one where she reluctantly participated in all aspects of the women’s lives. Skinning seals, cleaning and drying fish, and cutting beluga and caribou to store became her way of life. Plumbing, running water and electricity were not available. Loneliness was a constant companion until a few women befriended her.

During a span of six days, Deanne and Tiger narrowly escaped death during a camping trip, and Tiger suffered severe burns from a fire in their house. He spent three months in the hospital receiving treatment for seared lungs and horrific burns on his face and hands. His lungs never recovered from this ordeal.

When he was finally released from the hospital, he returned to the village with Deanne to complete the study. The life-threatening and harrowing experiences in Alaska transformed Deanne into a woman of strength who learned how to embrace challenge.

Over 50 years later, she remembers that young girl who left on an unknown journey that will live in her heart forever.

Author Deanne Burch was born and raised in Canada and attended the University of Toronto, obtaining B.A. degrees in liberal arts and social work. After the Alaska journey, she and her husband eventually settled in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where they lived until his death.

Deanne spent 30 years as a professional international photographer who taught and lectured in the U.S. and Canada. She published several articles in photography magazines and journals. Since retiring in 2014, she devoted herself to writing short stories and children’s stories. Journey Through Fire and Ice: Shattered Dreams Above the Arctic Circle was published in March 2021.

For more information, please visit www.Deanneburch.com, or follow her on Facebook at @DeanneBurchAuthor.

CUSTOMER REVIEW:
Heart Warming Real Life Adventure: What an amazing tale of confidence building in a completely unfamiliar culture in the Arctic on an island among native people of the north as a newly wed! The author speaks to the reader as if she were relating her adventures and feelings face to face. ~ PAgardener67

Journey Through Fire and Ice: Shattered Dreams Above the Arctic Circle

Publisher: Authority Publishing
ISBN-10: ‏1949642593
ISBN-13: ‎978-1949642599

Available from
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Book Promo ~ Equillian’s Key

Lose yourself in a nautical world where pirates plague the seas and pickpockets practice the art of the con in the fast-paced, rollicking adventure, Equillian’s Key. Author K.L. Harris’s fresh, dynamic narrative and unique, vibrant characters earned Equillian’s Key a 2021 Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a B.R.A.G Medallion.

Adventure-Packed Equillian’s Key
Plunges Readers into Vivid, Nautical World

Equillian’s Key, from K.L. Harris, plunges readers into the vivid, nautical world of Equillian, where pirates plague the seas, enchanted objects are outlawed, and a mysterious element whispers of unparalleled power.

The adventure-filled story begins in a time when Equillian’s precincts stand united, but the people are divided between the wealthy and the impoverished. With the alchemists’ creations banned, steam technology is on the rise, and flying ships are replacing the need for dragons.

Here, Bastian and Felix live a simple life, picking pockets and pulling cons on aristocrats, dreaming of the chance to change their stars. But that’s all turned upside down on Bastian’s 16th birthday, when crashing the duchess’s engagement party doesn’t quite go as planned. Who would’ve guessed that conning the guests, stealing the castle’s prized artifacts and wooing the betrothed duchess would cause so much trouble? The event casts them both into an unexpected adventure that will challenge everything they know and change their world forever.

The perfect escape, Equillian’s Key is a fast-paced fantasy woven with mystery, magic and romance that takes readers to a rich and interesting world full of vibrant characters. Harris’s immersive narrative draws readers in and takes them along on an epic ride — and the adventure has just begun. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K.L. Harris is a writer, author and all-around make-believer with an insatiable habit of turning words into worlds.

After years of adventuring around the globe, training for combat, pouring beers in dodgy taverns, working various odd jobs as a filmmaking thespian and entertaining children as a pirate, she finally realized that who she truly is, and always has been, is a writer.

Born and raised in the United States, Harris now lives in Western Australia with her husband and two children, dedicating her life to wrangling her young wild things and bringing readers the best stories she can imagine.

Equillian’s Key is the first book in Harris’s Archives of the Night-Watcher’s Series. Book two, Star-Locked, is scheduled for 2022.

For more information, visit www.masterofmakebelieve.com, or follow the author on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest at masterofmakebelieve.

Equillian’s Key

Publisher: Make-Believe Press

ISBN-10: ‎1732368600

ISBN-13: ‎978-1732368606

Available from
Amazon.com,
BN.com,
Indiebound.org
and many other online retailers

Book Promo: The Dog Days of August

Two thousand miles apart, crimes are
committed targeting a famous geologist

WHY?

Unfortunately, people venture where they should not,
and their good intentions turn into bad results.

 

Charlie Guest is visiting the Grand Canyon with his wife, Sophia. As a geologist, he competes throughout the year with other scientists for grant money from the government and various charitable foundations. Charlie needs to expand his research by hiring more people and exploring new terrain. To do that, he needs to obtain a substantial part of the funding at this year’s conference in Las Vegas. In past years he’d done well at this conference. He had garnered seconds or thirds with the appropriate funding attached. His goal, of course, is a first-place award. It would get him the money he needs, along with prestige. On the way to Vegas, however, things happen that threaten his attendance and his life. What is happening, and why? What secrets are being kept, and who is keeping them? Hapless reasoning can end up getting people hurt, and good intentions can turn out poorly. On one of those hot, humid, and rainy days in August, events occur two thousand miles apart that threaten the lives of two families.

Available on
AMAZON

 

Book Promo: Elope Your Life

Elope Your Life:
A Guide to Living Authentically and Unapologetically,
Starting With I Do

Elopement is not a rushed ending to your love story. It’s the beginning of the greatest adventure of your life. Sam Starns knows this first hand. After regretting her own lavish wedding ceremony and reception, she decided to dedicate her photography business to engaged couples who take the leap and embark on the brave and bold decision to elope. With Elope Your Life, Starns not only provides insight as an industry insider on the benefits of elopement, but how going against societal norms and standards can change the meaning of the phrase to a less traditional lifestyle. This mindset allows you to discover more about yourself and your relationship and opens you up to endless possibilities. By bringing out the unique qualities of someone who craves elopement and seeks adventure, you will then learn how to utilize these traits once you say “I do,” and every day after. Providing actionable steps to elopement from telling your family and friends, to finding a scenic and meaningful location, you’ll celebrate your love while being your most authentic self. It’s time to take the leap.

It’s time to Elope Your Life.

About Sam Starns

Sam Starns is an elopement expert and movement leader in adventure elopement photography. After regretting her own traditional wedding, she began her mission to empower individuals to become unapologetically themselves by creating a wedding day and life that they can be uniquely proud of.

Elope Your Life
ISBN-13 : 978-0578676524
Publisher : Sam Starns LLC

Available from:
Amazon
Barnes&Noble
Bookshop

Book Promo: Scoundrels Prefer Love

Scoundrels Prefer Love
(Fortune and Glory Book 2)

by Sandra             Sookoo

Adventure is exciting, but love is infinitely more heart-stopping.

Miss Calamity Calloway is the epitome of efficiency, as long as she’s typing travel reports, but when she’s out in the world, the troubles start. Tripping over laces, bumping into people on the street, and tumbling into awkward situations is the order of her days—and unfortunately, her handsome neighbor is usually a witness. All she longs for is a bit of trouble-free adventure.

Mr. Mason Lancaster is a retired American Navy man who has sailed all over the world, met countless dignitaries, and even taken on a stray pirate. A self-proclaimed scoundrel—women just complicate things after all—he’s on the hunt for the man who swindled his parents. When his neighbor, the smart, but clumsy Callie, decides to travel on her own, he joins the party… for her own good.

The mishaps—or adventures depending on who you ask—start before the two even board the ship. Callie’s penchant of falling into scrapes keeps them both busy, and an improper tryst further upsets the delicate friendship between them. But other dangers, lies, and deceptions also dog their steps, forcing Mason to decide where his priorities lie—protecting Callie or bagging his quarry. Perhaps a stroke of luck will correct their fate and prove life’s biggest adventure is worth its weight in trouble.

Buy Links

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Apple

About Sandra Sookoo

Sandra Sookoo is a USA Today bestselling author who firmly believes every person deserves acceptance and a happy ending. Most days you can find her creating scandal and mischief in the Regency-era, serendipity and happenstance in Victorian America or snarky, sweet humor in the contemporary world. Most recently she’s moved into infusing her books with mystery and intrigue. Reading is a lot like eating fine chocolates–you can’t just have one. Good thing books don’t have calories!

Book Promo: The Mendel Paradox by Nick Thacker

The Mendel Paradox
(Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 9)

by Nick Thacker

“Plenty of treachery… some truly unique forms of danger. A riveting imagined world, so real you’ll wonder it was imagined.” — Steve Berry, New York Times Bestselling Author

A company in Switzerland has been working to make the future of medicine and surgery a present-day reality.

Their successes have been stacking up for over a decade, and their next project promises great things.

Until things start to go awry.

Animal experimentation has never been an easy path for medical corporations.

…Especially when those animals revolt.

buy the Kindle edition on Amazon

about the author:

Nick Thacker is the USA Today Bestselling Author of action-adventure thrillers and mysteries, including the Harvey Bennett Thrillers series. Often mentioned as a cross between Clive Cussler and James Rollins, his stories are written in a fast-paced, punchy style.
He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, two kids, and two dogs.

 

more books by Nick Thacker

 

 

Book Promo: The Assassin’s Gift

The Assassin’s Gift ~ Books 1 & 2

by  Ian C.P. Irvine

The Assassin’s Gift (Book One): A Gripping Crime Thriller

  Salvador is the top assassin in the world: an invisible killer, feared, respected, in demand, and hunted by every crime agency on the planet.
For Salvador, killing is an art-form and a way of life, until during an accidental meeting with a mysterious monk on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland, Salvador is given a rare, unwanted gift: the ability to heal people.
Cursed and burdened with a ‘gift’ he cannot give back, Salvador must evaluate his life afresh, being able to kill with one hand, and cure with the other. Denying his Gift, he takes on his toughest assignments yet: to achieve the impossible by killing a top Scottish crime lord, Tommy McNunn, whilst locked up – and protected – inside Scotland’s impenetrable and most secure prison, nestled amidst the Scottish Highlands. And then to kill DCI Campbell McKenzie, the man responsible for McNunn’s imprisonment.

And Salvador would become the hunted.
Amazon Kindle
~~~~~

The Assassin’s Gift (Book Two): A Gripping Crime Thriller 

  Now also hunted by Russia’s top agent who is ordered to kill Salvador at all costs, Salvador discovers that everything in life happens for a reason, and that life and death are two sides of the same coin. A coin which he now owns.
But who is Salvador? What is the secret that protects his life? Why has he been given The Gift? And ‘how’ does he manage to pull off the crime of the century?

Amazon Kindle

About IAN.C.P. IRVINE

  Ian Irvine was brought up in Scotland, and studied Physics for far too many years, before travelling the world working for high-technology companies. Ian has spent a career helping build the internet and delivering its benefits to users throughout the world,…as well as helping to bring up a family. Ian enjoys writing, painting and composing in his spare time. His particular joy is found in taking scientific fact and creating a thrilling story around it in such a way that readers learn science whilst enjoying the thrill of the ride. It is Ian’s hope that everyone who reads an I.C.P.Irvine novel will come away learning something interesting that they would never otherwise have found an interest in. Never Science fiction. Always science fact. With a twist.
If you want to learn more about Ian C.P. Irvine and be informed about his next book to be published, please register at http://eepurl.com/AnYs9

 

 

 

 

Book Promo ~ A Rainbow Bridge by Erin O’Quinn

A cop and a scholar find an unlikely bridge into another century—the age of Robert Burns—where they meet the man who was the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, waiting for the gallows in 1788. Follow two lovers across a Rainbow Bridge spanning more than two centuries as they struggle to reconcile the convenient lies of history and the truth about their own conflicted relationship.

A Rainbow Bridge

Step back for a moment to September 30, 1788. At eight o’clock on the following morning, a man is to be hanged for the crime of burglary. The culprit, well known in the annals of Edinburgh history, is Deacon William Brodie. He’s so well known that there are at least two popular tourist spots on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile dedicated to his memory. He was also the model for Stevenson’s immortal “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

History says he died on the gallows on October 1, 1788. But what is the real story? And how do two contemporary men fit into this re-telling of history?

The reticent undercover detective Thomas Fitzgerald is already deeply in love…with a man who has just met him in an “alternate reality.” Tight-lipped and uptight as he is, a confession is out of the question. And Burns, not quite the same man he fell in love with, is afraid that his caped hero may misunderstand his own “insta-love.”
How can two stubborn men find that elusive bridge that spans then and now and tomorrow? This is where quantum entanglement, a kind of time-travel, enters the story—the bridge that connects past, present and future.

Follow two 21st-century lovers across a Rainbow Bridge spanning more than two centuries as they struggle to reconcile not just the convenient lies of history, but also the truth about their own conflicted relationship.

This full-length novel is a stand-alone. But it’s also the culmination of six previous novellas, the Burns! Mysteries.

About the Author:

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she’s met.

Erin is contracted to Siren BookStrand until 2017. She also has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also YA historical fantasy.

Buy Links

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Amazon

PayHip

Book Promo: Fate Walkers by Shar Martin

The once-magnificent city now sprawls dormant beneath the Amazon jungle, its pulse a terrible power still in play to this day. And it desperately wants entry back into our world… Gather your nerves for this spellbinding adventure filled with amazing treasure, disturbing villains, and shocking revelations in Fate Walkers by Shar Martin.

The story begins in the depths of the Amazon jungle.  Protagonist Ellis Hollander is a teenage prodigy in the field of archeology, and finds himself in charge of a haunted site.  Forced to shut down after his workers run away, he returns with spiritual reinforcements in the form of his best friend, Salvar.  In the meantime, while working on a dig in the Congo, he is plagued by horrifying visions and dreams, which he can only attribute to the Amazon project…

Unbeknownst to Ellis, he has an enemy.  Avrum Henson hates him and wants to destroy his reputation as “a leader among men.”  Driven by greed and envy, their inevitable clash ends in an unforgettable and terrifying revelation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Southern California, the author dabbled in the motion picture industry with extensive training in the craft of screenwriting.  After writing several feature-length scripts she discovered a passion for writing books. Over the years she has worked in the corporate arena and later attended Ashford University, majoring in English.  She currently lives in Houston, Texas with her family. Shar Martin is her pen name.

For more information, please visit www.BigRoost.com

Fate Walkers
by Shar Martin
Available at the author’s website and Amazon.com
ISBN: 9780578148328

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Lin Baker: “Fate Walkers is an excellent read…great storyline and a terrific job with your characters….It would make a great movie…”