I have some exciting news! Today and tomorrow (November 15 & 16) we are celebrating the November Book Festival!!!

I am participating with my book Raven Boy next to the following awesome writers: Carmen Allen, Eldritch Black, Dr. Block, Tracy Borgmeyer, Marion Brennan, Amanda Cetas, Nancy Golden, Shana Gorian, Karen Inglis, Kristin F. Johnson, Rae Knightly, A.M. Luzzader, Catherine Ann Russell, Terri Selting David, Melisa Torres, R.L. Ullman

and Marsha Tufft.

You are probably wondering why I put Madam Tufft separately. I will explain in a sec.

I don’t know about your school experience (BTW I would have loved to!); I can only speak about mine and those of about a dozen people who shared theirs with me.

I started school as a curious learner, believing that school was “the greatest good” that every child needed. (I no longer believe that, but that’s a different story). I wanted to discover it all and to be one of the best.

However, some subjects were just… not for me. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t be good at STEM. It was unexplainable – separate elements seemed clear per se, but they just wouldn’t add up into a clear picture in my mind. Eventually, I came to believe that I simply had no talent for that, that maybe my mind was working differently.

Now I understand that it could have caused a mental block hampering my future life and progress. It didn’t because, luckily, I was not the only one experiencing that. A little more than half of my class were bad at STEM. When you are the only one different, it can cause a trauma, but it’s all right when you see that many people are like that.

Can you imagine me now, as a grown-up with experience, suddenly finding out that, in fact, my mind is NOT working differently, that STEM is easy and perfectly understandable if and when people explain it the right way, using the right language, making efforts to show the fascinating side of it?!

That’s what happened when I read Marsha Tufft’s Putney Hicks Inventor Adventures series.

 read it because my niece asked me to buy the first book for her, and I try to read everything before giving it to her to be an “up-to-date auntie” ;)

What else to tell you, apart from the fact that it made me join Marsha Tufft’s fan club?

As I found out later, Marsha had a successful career as an engineer, and her goal is to show children (and adults like me, apparently) that STEM can be cool and inspiring. And she shows it through the story of a girl, full of awesome adventures :)))

If you think of someone who might be struggling with STEM and who could use a great remedy like that, go and check out Marsha’s books at out November Book Festival. I believe, at least one of them is FREE ;)

Enjoy! ;-)