JACKSON – A township mom seeking to teach her child some strong morals and encourage her interest in reading found a way to do both through her own imagination and writing skills.
Now other children will also be able to enjoy meeting the characters of Lori Nates’ new book, “Misty the Unicorn and the Magical Rainbow.”
“Defiance Press and Publishing recently published my first children’s book which is for children ages 5-12, and teaches kids good morals and patriotism in a fun and subtle way,” Nates said.
“I wrote the book mostly for my daughter. She is on the autism spectrum and she absolutely loves fantasy and adventure stories. She isn’t a great reader so I wanted to get her more interested in reading.”
I created characters that I hoped she would love and I wanted to write a book primarily for her and that is how it started,” Nates said. Later, however, the budding author had some second thoughts. “I thought maybe other children would like the story and maybe my book could help other children become more interested in enjoying reading.”
“That is what happened and I thought this could become a series and I am actually working on my second book right now,” she added. Her first book was published in September and it is available on Amazon.
Nates is currently planning a four-book series “with these characters and hopefully there will be more after that. The main character is a six-year-old girl named Becka. My daughter’s name is Rebecca so it is based on my daughter.”
“Becka lives in Ohio and her mother gives her a unicorn toy for her birthday and one night in the summer she sees a shooting star and she wishes for her toy to be real,” the author said. “Later that night, she hears a knock at her bedroom window and there is a real-life unicorn there.”
Nates added, “the real-life unicorn looks exactly like her toy and the unicorn takes her back across a rainbow to a magical country for a visit and they meet a lot of characters. There are people and animals. There is a leprechaun, a prince and people who are all the different colors of the rainbow.”
Becka and Misty the Unicorn tours the country “and she goes to different places there. She goes to the farmers’ market, a park where she confronts bullies. She goes to her new friend’s farm. It teaches morals but it is really subtle. It isn’t in your face at all but it does talk about friendship and kindness.”
The book also speaks to the ethic of “responsibility, trust, honesty, acceptance but it is very, very, subtle and includes a love of country,” she added.
Nates stressed that while the book presents many moral messages, “it is done in a fun way.” She took some inspiration to the Wizard of Oz books “which were some of my favorite books when I was a kid.”
She is busy writing her sequel to her first book that will involve Becka returning to the mystical country “and we’ll meet some new characters along with some of the old ones from the first book.”
Growing up, Nates said she always loved creative writing. “English was my favorite subject when I was in school and I was a big reader. I read all of the Wizard of Oz books, Nancy Drew and I wrote some Wizard of Oz stories myself. I have notebooks full of Wizard of Oz stories.”
“My daughter really loves Star Wars,” the writer said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, “I ended up writing a Star Wars novel, 150 pages and I published it online on a fan fiction site. I read that to her. She was only 10 at the time. She really loved it. That was really the first book I wrote but it was fan fiction. This was my first young reader book.”
“The feedback has been really good from both adults and children,” she said. “My niece is five and a half and my nephew is nine and they absolutely loved it. I’ve gotten some good reviews on Amazon.”
“My parents’ friends thought it was very well written and they really loved the illustrations also,” she added. “Defiance has a wonderful illustrator. I thought the pictures came out really, really well. I am just hoping to expand my audience a little bit to more children so they could learn to love reading.”
