Jeff wrote Caroline & Mordecai the Gand after receiving a devastating diagnosis of stage 3 cancer. The novella was meant as a private story for his five children on how to face grief by holding onto joy and love. He leads an active life in Maryland with his wife Nicole by trying to constantly keep up with their kids. In rare moments of quiet, he can be found in the back of Old Fox Books in Annapolis working on his next novel or on JeffGunhus.com.
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Read With A Pen
Mrs. Harvey was a classic British schoolteacher. She was tough as woodpecker lips, with a steel reinforced spine, and an eyebrow that could arch in such a way as to strike fear into a schoolboy's heart. She also happens to be the person who put a love of vocabulary into the 10-year-old version of myself. She taught me amazing words like cacophony, gregarious, and reverberated. She also taught me to always read with a pen.
Librarians, those fantastic and mystical creatures that live in the book stacks across America, would likely tie Mrs. Harvey to the stake for her advice and send her smoldering ashes up into the sky for her transgression. So, for you librarians who might read this, I'm just reporting the news, so don't blame me.
Mrs. Harvey was adamant that a pen, not a pencil, be used to circle and highlight and annotate anything that was read. Whether that be a newspaper article, Boys Life magazine, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Things to be circled were not only words that were unknown, but words or ideas that delighted. Also, to be etched into the border around the text were ideas that spawned in the moment, that unbelievable trigger of imagination released by an author who may have written words decades earlier only to reach out across space and time to flip a switch inside your mind to release a new thought, a new idea, a new wonder.
I've only followed Mrs. Harvey's rule sporadically through my life. I do love it when I pick up a paperback novel that I read in my 20s and see my little scribblings. I think of her, but I also think about the person I was when I read that book the first time. When I see the pages are bare and unadorned with my marks, I feel a little let down. I tried the highlight feature on Kindle, but it just wasn’t the same.
I recently just read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I read it with a pen and left marks of delight all over it. This kind of interactive reading creates a bond with the text and makes it easier to go back to find the things that amazed us. Try it (on books you own), but don't tell the librarians or the book purists who feel any marking or dog-earing is a desecration.
I hope you will read Caroline & Mordecai the Gand with a pen and find much to circle within its pages.
Happy reading!
Book Title: Caroline & Mordecai the Gand by Jeff Gunhus
Category: Middle-Grade Fiction (Ages 8-12), 186 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Literary
Publisher: Seven Guns Press
Release date: March 31, 2021
Content Rating: PG: The language is G. There is one scene with the main character punches a bully resulting in a bloody nose. The emotional treatment of grief and the death of a loved one can be somewhat intense.
"Caroline’s story is profoundly sad, and yet hopeful, magical, and yet rooted in reality. There is magic, mystery, and daring adventure." - BooksCoffee
This novella was written by USA Today bestselling author Jeff Gunhus after he received a devastating diagnosis of state 3 cancer. The story is a message to his five children on how to deal with grief and a plea for them to grasp onto joy and love even in the darkest of times.
Caroline loses her spark. It takes a great adventure for her to find it again.
Caroline loses her father in a car accident for which she feels responsible. Consumed by grief, she has a difficult time readjusting to a world that has changed so dramatically for her. On the anniversary of her father’s death, a strange window opens in the middle of the small lake behind her house. She climbs up an old oak to peer inside, but falls out of the tree and discovers that the window also serves as a door into a different world.
Enter Mordecai the Gand, a mysterious traveler who befriends Caroline and promises to help her find a way back home since the window she fell through has disappeared. The two set out on a series of adventures that include visiting a tree village populated by a tribe known for eating travelers, running into a witch under a spell of her own making, hiding in a cave with a dragon encased in a wall of ice (prone to melting by campfire), all the while being pursued by a mysterious entity call the Creach which promises to devour Caroline and trap her in an eternity of despair.
As they navigate these adventures and this new world, Caroline slowly discovers that she is meant to help each of the characters she meets. As she battles internally whether to stay or return home to the sadness and grief waiting for her there, she must regain perspective and open her heart to the act of caring and to the joy of love itself. In the end, she must demonstrate great courage, loyalty, and caring as the plot unfolds, becoming the active hero of her own story.
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