Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

For those of you who have been following my book reviews, this will be a bit different for you. Today I read a book to be published on February 11, 2025, a children’s picture book with only 40 pages, short paragraphs on each page, and bright, colorful illustrations on every page. This is a bit out of the ordinary for me, but when browsing new titles in NetGallery, I spotted this and was immediately drawn to the title for multiple reasons.

First of all, I am a writer. As a freelance writer, I’ve written a lot of essays (see my essay a week for a year project on my website!), a lot of articles for parenting magazines, and a lot of profiles of local celebrities. I’ve also written a handful of short stories, about 9,000 words of a novel, an outline for a nonfiction book for middle schoolers of a religious nature, and one play.

In addition, I was heavily involved in community theatre for five years, having been onstage, backstage, and front of the house for over forty productions. When I migrated from a legal career to education, I became the drama club moderator at my first school and directed two plays a year for ten years.

So, as you can see, I was drawn to this book right from the start solely from the title. As I read the book description on NetGalley, I realized that this adorable book is written by the adult daughter of Jane Yolen, one of my favorite children’s authors. In my first year of teaching middle school language arts, relying heavily on the 7th grade textbook/anthology in my classroom, I discovered Jane Yolen’s “Suzy and Leah,” an absolutely beautiful short story told in epistolary form, diary entries of two girls from very different backgrounds. One is a Jewish refugee from a concentration camp during WWII and the other a very privileged girl in Oswego, New York, where the refugee children were brought to live in barracks and attend a local public school. I taught that story every year of my almost 20-year career, and each and every year it was the favorite of many of my students. Jane Yolen became a favorite of mine, too.

Janie Writes a Play is the real-life story of the real-life Jane Yolen being bored with her elementary school play when reading the script for the first time, so she goes home that night and…writes an entire play, complete with choreography and songs, for her class to perform. Because she had a very supportive and understanding teacher, she was allowed to share her play with her classmates that very day, and it was the play rehearsed and later performed for the parents. This was the very beginning of Jane Yolen, the writer. And, this story is brought to us compliments of Heidi Stemple, Jane’s daughter, who is now also a writer of children’s books.

This book is delightful. The illustrations are lovely, they absolutely jump off the page with gleeful enthusiasm. It tells the story of a child living in the world of words, reading and writing every day, not just for school, but for fun, too.

It is so very inspiring for young, creative children to see that these things can really happen. Ideas can become real things. Creating a story can turn into a play, a book, a movie, or a song. Combine that creativity with supportive adults, and the sky is the limit for young people to see their artistic talents come to life.

In this book, Janie was so fortunate to have a supportive teacher who put aside her own plans and allowed a student to have authentic input. Janie’s parents were supportive of her reading and writing habits even as a young child, giving her books that were way above her reading level, helping her and her brother create a neighborhood newspaper, which Janie’s mom typed up each copy individually.

For anyone reading this who has young children, please take notice. Read to your children, allow them the freedom to read whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want. Help make their creative dreams come to life. Expose them to live performances, museum exhibitions, frequent trips to the library, and any classes you can afford for them to explore the imaginative sides of their personalities. You won’t be sorry. You just might end up with a young Jane Yolen on your hands!

Thank you to NetGalley and Charlesbridge Publishers for this advanced copy! What a delightful story!