I have partnered with Page Street Kids and The Children’s Book Review to bring you an interview with Aaron Lewis Krol, author of A Cloud in a Jar. Be sure to check out the giveaway at the end of the interview for your chance to win a hardcover copy of A Cloud in a Jar.

A Cloud in a Jar

Written by Aaron Lewis Krol
Illustrated by Carlos Vélez Aguilera

Ages 4+ | 32 Pages
Publisher: Pages Street Kids | ISBN-13: 9781645679936

Publisher’s Book Summary: 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.

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INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR AARON LEWIS KROL

Tynea: What inspired you to write A Cloud in a Jar?

Aaron: I wasn’t really trying to write a picture book­—I just got a little piece of nonsense verse stuck in my head. It went:

We left in a rowboat, Lou Dozens and me,
And Salman the cat, who was leading the way
(With his chin in a kerchief to fend off the spray
Because cats like their whiskers kept dry)

Through the whispering waters of Tangerine Bay
To the sun-speckled Island of Spry.

(Which is not even in the final book as published. “Island of Spry” is a real stretch for a rhyme – I really didn’t think anyone was going to read this.) Anyway, that probably would have been the end of it, but at the time I had a job I was starting to get bored of, and on my lunch breaks I would take long walks around town just to get out of the office, and I found this little verse cycling through my head over and over again as I walked, which was pretty annoying! But if I added to it, I wouldn’t have the same one verse in my head on a loop. Soon I had a second verse about this Island of Spry, where it was summer all year round and never rained. Well then maybe our narrator was trying to bring them some rain; maybe he had a cloud with him, bottled up in a jar to keep it safe. Before long I needed an actual plot and something for this “Lou Dozens” to do, and at a certain point I was putting an awful lot of thought and effort into this to not try to publish it…

Tynea: What is one thing you hope people take away from reading this story?

Aaron: I’d love for kids to get a taste for unusual rhyme and meter! Rhymed children’s books are almost always written in tetrameric couplets—that’s the classic Dr. Seuss pattern, “This one has a little star, this one has a little car.” Which is not a dig at that rhyme pattern at all! I read loads of Dr. Seuss to my kids. A good poet can write wonderful verse that way. But looking back, I can see that a lot of the books I was most attached to as a kid—Jack Prelutsky, the poems collected in Eric Carle’s Animals Animals, Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones by Ruth Heller—were written with these strange, creative, many-colored rhyme schemes I wasn’t seeing or hearing anywhere else. I wanted A Cloud in a Jar to have that kind of music to it. If you’re a real poetry geek, you might spot that it’s a variation on ballad meter with a mixed-up triplet rhyme scheme and an extra foot in the second line. But for the 99% of people who aren’t, I just hope you’ll find it doesn’t sound quite like anything else on your shelf and that there’s something exciting about that.

Tynea: You have a passion for science. How do you incorporate that passion into your writing?

Aaron: In my day job, I write about science full-time—I write scripts for MIT’s climate change podcast (TILclimate, do look it up!) and for climate.mit.edu where we answer readers’ climate questions with help from the scientists and researchers at MIT.

A Cloud in a Jar is not about climate, but I think you’ll be able to spot that I love both engineering and the natural world. It helps having an amazing illustrator like Carlos—every time the story called for a diving whale or a swirling flock of razorbills, he gave back these vivid, astonishing paintings with all the life and energy of animals in the wild.

Tynea: What is one way you would encourage children to care for the environment?

Aaron: I saw a survey once of adults who had changed their behavior to be better for the climate and environment, and one of the top motivations they named was, “my kid asked why we weren’t already doing this.” I think your superpower as a child is that people around you really care about the world they’re leaving you. Not just your parents, but the teachers and administrators at your school, the people running the camps and after-school activities you’re part of, relatives and friends’ parents—a lot of people care about you! If you have questions about why we get around the way we do, heat and power our homes the way we do, what we’re doing with our waste, you might be surprised how valuable it is just to ask.

Tynea: What were some of your favorite things to do and create as a child?

Aaron: I signed up for a lot of activities—like Odyssey of the Mind and Camp Invention, both of which I think are still around—where you’re given a jumble of craft materials and asked to solve challenges with them. You know, make a plane that can reach this line on the floor, build a bridge that can hold up these blocks, craft a theater, construct a vehicle to push a ball through an obstacle course, that sort of thing. Later I was a counselor at Camp Invention, my first job as a teenager, so all this jury-rigging of contraptions out of household objects is pretty ingrained in my brain. Which is probably why, when I had the name “Lou Dozens” tossing around in my head, my first thought was that maybe she has dozens of handkerchiefs and safety pins and rubber bands in her pockets, and when she gets into trouble her instinct is to invent her way out of it.