🎉 I have a very exciting announcement to make!

My fourth novel, SECRETS AT SPARHAWK POINT, releases on August 25, 2026 from Holiday House! 🎉

The amazing cover is by Stephanie Son, who has created all of my book covers!

And here’s the description:

***
To draw tourists to their declining coastal town, a group of children claim to have seen a mythic creature from Ojibwe legend, the storm-monster Mishi-Biizhiw. But when their plan backfires, they’ll need to convince everyone the beast is only make-believe. But… what if it isn’t?

1943. Sparhawk Point, Michigan may be a small town, but it’s home. For the Swedish Ahlstrom girls, it’s the only place they’ve ever known—a place they may have to leave if their father’s church can’t find more parishioners. The Ojibwe Robicheaux boys are struggling, too: a lack of tourists means no income from their mother’s two rental cottages. These kids can’t bear the thought of leaving… so they’ll have to make new residents come to them, and fast.

After spotting an unknown object in the water, they find their solution. Drawing on inspiration from Ojibwe stories of the mysterious Mishi-Biizhiw—the riser of storms on Lake Superior—the children spread stories of their very own “American Loch Ness monster” to bring curious visitors to their shores. But their plan works too well! People become afraid to visit. To save their families, they’ll need to convince everyone that the creature isn’t real… even if that may prove to be their biggest lie yet.

***

I am so excited for August and can’t wait for you to read this story!

I am delighted to announce that my third middle grade historical novel, THE BLOSSOMING SUMMER, releases today! It’s available wherever books are sold. I hope you check it out!!

I tried something over this past year that I’ve never done before: I journaled every single day!

I have kept various journals all my life, starting at the age of six. I have a computer file of journal entries from the past sixteen years, but those efforts were never very consistent, and most of the entries were written sporadically—sometimes with six months between them.

But last February, I saw a writer doing a journaling challenge: writing a journal entry every day for three months. While I admired her consistency, I assumed that this was something I could never do. Yet it looked like such a fun challenge, so I decided that one month would not be so difficult to keep up with. I could try it for one month.

I got out an adorable journal and began writing. I challenged myself to write at least one full page each day, because I knew that after a few days I would resort to writing a mere one or two lines.

I did something different with this journal: before this, there was never anything visual prompting me to journal before. I always put my journal away somewhere, and that computer file certainly didn’t take up space. But this time, I kept my journal where I would see it every single day: in the stack of current reads next to my bed.

And it reminded me! Every evening I would write a page. In the past, my journal entries would often be a rundown of what I’d done that day. But this time I shook things up. Some pages did describe something that I’d done that day, but other pages were dedicated to gratitude lists, memories, or genealogical research. Other pages were creative: poems, observations about books or movies, or analyses of my writing dilemmas.

After journaling this way for entire year—hardly ever missing a day—I can say that this process has changed me as a writer. I never would have thought that keeping a consistent journal would help me as a writer, but it has. It’s much easier to jump into a piece of fiction writing now than it used to be—I have that consistency habit down. Writing—and subsequently re-reading—my entries on creative problems has helped me to identify patterns in my process that need to be adjusted; reading older entries reminds me of how I tackled problems before and how to approach them now. Two of those poems turned into a picture book manuscript. Even ranking my favorite characters in a book—something I do when I can’t think of a good topic!—has been helpful for thinking about characters in new ways.

Needless to say, I’m going to continue my practice of journaling one page a day, and I encourage you to do the same if you’re in need of a boost of creativity!

I wanted to give a quick everyone a update on my current writing projects!

This past summer/fall, I’ve been working on some of the last edit rounds for The Blossoming Summer, my third novel. It will release on June 3, 2025, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s about a girl named Rosemary who leaves London at the start of WWII to to live with her grandmother in Wisconsin, where she discovers her previously unknown Ojibwe heritage.

I’ve also been working on revisions for two projects that I can’t discuss much yet. But they’re very cool 🙂

I’m drafting another book, and I’m nearly to the midpoint, exactly halfway through. I’ve only written it for 32 days so far, so I’m quite pleased with my progress!

And I was so immersed in this new book that I wasn’t even trying to invent another story idea yet. But a sudden, full-fledged idea just seemed to drop in my lap one day–a combination of some previous ideas that, once merged, became a premise I absolutely love. So I’ve been brainstorming a bit on that and have even been working on a Pinterest board for it!

I took some photos for these new stories recently, to inspire me as I write:

All of these projects are such a joy, and I can’t wait to be able to share more about all them sooner or later. 🙂

Are you working on any writing projects right now?

My debut novel, The Star That Always Stays, celebrated an exciting milestone on Tuesday, September 5: the paperback edition released into the world!

It was a thrilling moment for me, and to celebrate even further, I announced on Instagram that I would answer some questions about TSTAS in honor of the paperback. Here are some of those questions and my answers:

What was the initial first spark of inspiration for the story? I first got the idea when I was doing genealogy research about my great-grandmother. The events happening in her life when she was fourteen—starting high school while dealing with her parents’ divorce, her mother’s remarriage, and the beginning of World War I—made me think that this could be a compelling middle grade novel.

Do you see yourself in any of the TSAS characters? If so, in what way? I absolutely see myself in the characters. I was a lot like Norvia as a teenager, but as a child, I was a little bit more like Dicta! I definitely have Norvia’s bookworm tendencies, and I also share Vernon’s interest in classical music.

Did you have a specific playlist/mood board you referred to while drafting this project? I just mentioned classical music, and some of the pieces mentioned in the book were actually ones I listened to while writing (the full list can be found here). During one of the major overhaul drafts of the book, I remember listening to the finale of Dvořák’s String Quartet in F major over and over again. I also listened to some Ojibwe, Acadian, and Celtic music while writing the Beaver Island flashbacks.

How did you grow as an author as you wrote it? What I learned most was that revisions are crucial to shaping any book into what it needs to be. You have to be willing to rewrite and revise your story and make significant changes! Nothing has been more instrumental to my writing than being able to look at a project to see how it could be improved, and finding editors and mentors to help me along the way. Writing (and re-writing!) TSTAS helped me grow so much as an author.

What inspired you to include all the classic books in the story? At the time I was writing TSTAS, I was delving into a lot of vintage girls’ books and absolutely loving them, and this really inspired me to make Norvia into a reader of those same kinds of stories. I feel that a coming-of-age story written in a classic style featuring a character from a Native background is really meaningful. If you’re a fan of Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, like so many people are, then this is a way for you to revisit and enjoy that kind of story all over again, but this time with a character from a different culture. (All the books mentioned in TSTAS can also be found here.)

What was your favorite part of writing TSTAS? My absolutely favorite part was bringing my ancestors to life through this story and exploring what their lives might have been like! And my favorite scene to write was the section where Norvia, Dicta, and Vernon invent a very imaginative game together, and it’s the first time they begin to have fun as siblings. That part was added during the writing of the third draft, and it was the first scene I wrote of the new version!

What is the message you’d like readers to take away from TSAS? My hope is that readers come away feeling joyful, regardless of what’s happening in their lives at the moment. It’s important to me to write stories that are realistic yet inspiring!