Exciting New Children's Book On The Way

[Eva Elisabeth]

Hi Mike,
today I received your book which I had ordered only three days ago. (Incredible. I didn't know Amazon prints books. It was printed in Leipzig, crazy! And shipping had not been charged additionally.) I skimmmed it in my lunch break.
First of all: Mary would love the way you drew her! (The others would be pleased with themselves, too.)If I had to teach the topic, I would have so many ideas how to use this book. It was very clever to alternate text and comic passages (text on each left, comic on each right side, summarizing the text on the left), so there's still a lot of text and thus background information included. And immediate repetition via a different medium, clever, indeed. Since today a lot of kids don't like to read any longer texts, this is a very "suger-coating" method. For teaching I would also appreciate that the text passages always cover the entire page. (Textbooks anyway more and more tend to become picture galleries with some "disturbing" text passages spread in. IMO that looks most confusing and completely takes attention away from the last remaining bits of content.)
May I ask, how long did you work on this project? I truly take my hat off to your ideas and drawing skills!

May I now tell you my ideas for some slight "satin polish" (absolutely not intended as criticism):

-In my edition the pages are not numbered. This makes it pretty difficult to advise: "Turn to page..."

- I like all the quotes you've collected for the preface and think was a good idea to add them! However, if I read a quote, I want at least to know when it was said (...at best briefly on which occasion, too, but this, indeed, would be too much.) It wouldn't take much space to add the date, but would make the (young) readers once more aware of that all this didn't just happen "once upon a time".

- Like Laurie, I love the glossary. It's just a pity that, in case you haven't first spotted that it will follow the main part, you are not aware of the additional information while reading the respective words in the plot. An asterisk marking those words (or similar) and a guiding remark in the preface would avoid any ignorance.

Again, please regard all this just as my personal additional ideas, not as criticism. Your book and work is great! (And Mike - will other topics follow...?)