A Cloud in a Jar by Aaron Lewis Krol and Carlos Vélez Aguilera

I have a wonderful kids book to share with you along with The Children’s Book Review and in partnership with Page Street Kids. This book is ideal for ages 4 and up, especially if they are interested in adventure!

About the Book:

It’s just after midnight on Walton Wharf West, but there’s no time for sleeping―adventure awaits! Get dressed, grab your oars, let’s not delay. Lou Dozens is here, and we’re sailing to Firelight Bay!

In this modern, young, bold, and inventive adventure, Lou drags her more cautious friend on a daring voyage across the sea. Though their destination is a glorious land of year-round summers, long slides, and picnics a hundred yards wide, the children there have never seen rain, even once.

The mission is simple: bring Firelight Bay a cloud in a jar. But the journey is anything but. Readers will delight in the story’s twists, turns, and unexpected solutions―from a sail of patchwork handkerchiefs to a net crafted from recycled cell phone chargers that saves a beached whale. It’ll take every knick-knack in Lou’s pockets and all the cleverness the pair can muster to safely deliver their gift.

With captivating illustrations and whimsical yet delightfully intricate rhyming text reminiscent of classic children’s poetry, this seafaring quest is one young readers will not soon forget.

 

Author Interview:

Congratulations on your debut picture book! Did you always want to be an author?

Not quite: between the ages of two and five I desperately wanted to be a paleontologist! But yes, I’ve been writing stories since elementary school. My mom has a big box of old notebooks and grade-school literary magazines somewhere that I’m sure would be very embarrassing to page through now.

 

What inspired A Cloud in a Jar? Why did you decide to write this book?

I’ve always loved classic children’s poetry—nonsense poets like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear—and poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Service who didn’t write for children exactly, but whose rhythms and rhymes play the same chords. (“The Cremation of Sam McGee” is just perfect for an eight-year-old.) When I was older I learned that the rhythm all these poets used was called ballad meter. It’s easy to follow, trips lightly over its rhymes, and has the forward pull of a good adventure. It’s also not used much by children’s authors anymore and I truly don’t know why.

Anyway, when a little nonsense verse sprang into my head one day, it’s probably not surprising it was in ballad meter. (With a little tweak or two of my own.) There was a rowboat, and a cat, and a girl named “Lou Dozens,” and the start of an adventure on the open sea. I didn’t think I’d ever write a picture book, but I just kept adding to it, and at a certain point it was just obvious that I was going to tune it up and try to publish it.

 

What is your writing process?

Something I love about rhymed poetry is that writing it can have a bit of the thrill of solving a tough puzzle. You’ve got to take it verse by verse, and know exactly how much ground you can cover in four or six lines. If I know where the story has to go by the end of the verse I’m writing, then I probably know my end rhyme: “This is a job—for a SAIL!” So now, to fit my rhyme pattern, I need two rhymes for sail. Whale, scale, gale, pale, assail, prevail, flail… which of them can I plug into the correct lines and tell the story I’m trying to tell? What’s a second trio of rhymes that can fill in the action alongside them? I won’t get it right on the first try, so the rhymes have to cycle around like a Rubik’s cube, or I have to slide out a whole triplet and put in a new one like a new shape in a packing puzzle. It’s incredibly satisfying when it all fits into the right shape of a story.

 

The cover is very eye-catching. Who chose the image for the cover?

I promise every page is as gorgeous as the cover! It was chosen by my illustrator Carlos Vélez Aguilera, and I could not be happier that he signed onto the book. When I first saw his portfolio I knew I’d get those lush colors, big expressive action sequences, and loads of off-beat details crammed into every corner of the page. What I didn’t realize was how often he’d find some incredible perspective shift to lift up the scenes. Views from overhead, half-submerged in water, zoomed way in or backing out to take in the horizon—every sketch he sent me had a level of visual imagination I could never have brought to this book on my own.

 

What is the most fun part of this book?

I’ve already mentioned the illustrations and the ballad meter, which would be my first two answers, so let me toss a small pleasure out there. In the original draft of A Cloud in a Jar, a cat named Salman featured prominently in the story, but when Page Street picked up the book they asked for it to be four pages shorter, and I found that Salman had to go to keep the story moving along in a tighter page count. But I was very attached to Salman! So my one and only instruction to Carlos when he came on board was that there should be a cat who joins the lead characters on their journey.

I’m so glad I did, because Carlos is a cat owner himself and really brought this one to life. I love flipping through and seeing what the cat is up to on every page.

 

You write about climate change and solutions for MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. What are some of the most dramatic climate changes you have studied?

 

One—I won’t say fun, but very interesting—thing about digging into climate change is you learn a lot more about how weather systems work. For instance, warmer air can hold more water. That explains an awful lot about the climate change we’re experiencing: as the air gets warmer on average, we get more water in the air, which leads to more precipitation, more flooding, and also more really humid days when people can’t cool themselves by sweating and are at the greatest risk from extreme heat. But it also leads to more drought. All that extra water in the air needs to come from somewhere, and to a large extent it comes from plants and soils down here—so many areas are getting longer droughts, punctuated by bigger downpours.

I feel like I should say for your readers that A Cloud in a Jar is not, like, an allegory for climate change. If you’re worried about having the “climate change talk” with your kids, I understand completely—I have not talked to my four-year-old about this yet either! You can read this book without fear that I’m trying to sneak a climate lesson in. On the other hand, if you’re curious to get a better grip on climate change, I definitely encourage you to check out the podcast I write for—TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), which breaks down the basics in 15-minute episodes in plain language featuring MIT scientists and researchers. It’s on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or at tilclimate.mit.edu.

 

How can kids learn about the climate?

There is not a lot of great material out there for picture book-age kids to learn about climate change. NASA has a website called “climate kids” that I think is pretty well done, but I don’t really expect 5- to 8-year-olds to sit down and read through a website like that. I have mixed feelings about this: it’s obviously a very important thing going on in their world, but it’s a lot for a little kid to absorb without much resolution on how it’s going to turn out or what they can personally do about it. I don’t know that I would care to sit my kids down and give them a little “climate change course”—and this is my job! I think the good news is that little bits and pieces of the climate story are being worked more and more into children’s media. If your kids watch PBS or some of the better-produced streaming shows, they might be getting the shape of climate change in small doses here and there already, which I think is roughly appropriate. By the time they’re a little older and tuning more into the news, or encountering climate change at school, they might already know enough to ask questions instead of just being taken by surprise.

 

How can kids help the climate?

There have been some great surveys about what encouraged adults to take more action on climate in their own lives, and one of the biggest motivators is, “my kids asked me questions I didn’t have good answers for.” I love that. Kids have such a clear moral sense, and when they learn what’s going on with our planet and what’s causing it, they ask all the right questions about how things could be different. So I guess I’d just say, don’t hesitate to ask. You’re probably making some good points.

 

What are some of your hobbies?

I had many more hobbies before I had young kids to take care of (ages 1 and 4, I’m really in the thick of it!), so I now have to say this all with a twinge of regret and nostalgia, but… I love board games and movies, I play a little guitar, and I’m an enthusiastic birdwatcher. The birdwatching is, I realize, incredibly dorky, but I also warmly recommend it. Every spring the North American forests and meadows turn into a tropical riot of color and song, and you just have to get a nice pair of binoculars, some sturdy shoes, and learn how to see it.

 

Do you have plans to write more books?

Definitely! It turns out I love writing children’s verse, so I have a second picture book I’m shopping around called Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! about a giant who’s not sure what to do with the human child who just showed up on his doorstep. I also made the terrible decision, for a father of two with a full-time job, to try writing a children’s novel, and page by agonizing page I’m getting through it …

 

What advice do you have for children to follow their dreams?

You know it sort of depends what the dream is? If I were still aching to be a paleontologist I’d be kind of out of luck—there’s a very straightforward path of study you have to take and excel at, and if that’s your dream you should ask how you get to be a paleontologist now while you’re young and patiently follow the steps. I know a guy who’s wanted to be a meteorologist for as long as he can remember, and he is a successful meteorologist now, and it’s because he read everything he could about weather when he was little and then kept taking courses in it and got the right degrees and got hired by the National Weather Service.

Luckily I wanted to be a writer and there are fewer rules! Really the only ones are read a lot and write a lot. If that’s the kind of itch you have, my only advice is don’t let the itch go away, don’t ignore it, and take disappointments in stride. You have to write a lot of stuff that isn’t very good (even though it seems to you, at the time, that it’s absolutely brilliant), and get it rejected and not take it too hard, and get a little better and more distinct as a writer every time.

 

Giveaway

A Cloud in a Jar Book Giveaway

Enter for the chance to win a hardcover copy of A Cloud in a Jar!

Two (2) winners receive:

A hardcover copy of A Cloud in a Jar

 

About the Author:

Aaron Lewis Krol lives with his family in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he writes about climate change science and solutions for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. Like many, his early education included many “invention challenges” where students were tasked with building structures from everyday materials, and he’s pretty sure that’s where the idea for Lou Dozens came from. A Cloud in a Jar is his first picture book.

 

About the Illustrator:

Carlos Vélez Aguilera lived in the oceanside town of Puerto Vallarta for a time and drew from his memory of those beautiful landscapes and the sense of adventure they gave him while illustrating this book. He also poured in his general love of clouds, the sea, and whales. In addition to drawing, Carlos also likes to dance. He lives in Mexico City, Mexico, with his cat, Benito.