Reading is a journey: why I wrote The Great Heroes for those who find it harder to get there, too

When a child opens one of the books in The Great Heroes series and begins to read, their brain sets off on a journey, line after line, through a world that did not exist before that moment. It is more than a figure of speech: it is what happens, in a very real way, every time a story is read rather than told. The page becomes a road, and the reader travels along it on their own, one step after another, until they reach a place they have never been.

And in those books, the world the reader travels through is never one invented simply to let them dream. Whoever walks through those pages meets someone who lived through exactly what the book describes, and who left behind a real path to follow, rather than a trail drawn for the occasion. It is a detail that may seem small, but it changes the nature of the journey: we are not exploring a place of fantasy, but revisiting a place that once existed.

And that journey is never made alone. There is the relationship with the person who wrote those pages, with the choice of every word intended to reach the person who will read it. But there is another relationship too, a quieter one: the bond with someone sharing the same story at the very moment it is being read, a child stepping into a page on their own, and an adult beside them as they do so, perhaps without adding a word, simply waiting to find out how it ends.

There is one point, though, that I often think about when writing for children who are learning to read: reading is a right, but it is not a right that everyone can exercise in the same way. There are children who open a book and step into it effortlessly, and there are children for whom every line is an uphill climb, not because they lack the desire or the intelligence, but because deciphering those marks on the page requires work that others do not even need to imagine. And if a text does not take this into account, the journey I spoke of at the beginning, the one the brain should take when reading, never even begins for them.

It was at this boundary that I worked when writing The Great Heroes. Each sentence is built to stand on its own, without subordinate clauses climbing over one another, so that those who find reading harder do not have to stop twice on the same line. The content is not simplified: the true story keeps all its complexity, and what changes is the path towards it, made easier to follow for those who would normally be left out.

And this is not just about sentences. It is also about the moment when someone is there beside the child, accompanying them: an adult who stays there, present, without correcting every word that is a struggle to say, as the page is conquered one line at a time. That presence is as much a part of the book as the printed sentences, and a text meant to be read with someone must leave room for that too, not just for the words.

There is a moment I sometimes see: a child who usually stops after two lines reaches the bottom of the page. It is the same journey I spoke of at the beginning: a brain walking through a world that has never existed before, this time without being left behind by those who walk faster.