The second time around

I have three children, ages four, seven, and ten, and I live in Oulu, and I have read every book on the Finnish children's library shelves at least twice because that is what having three readers in the house requires. The ten-year-old has started insisting on books in which something real is at stake. Not symbolic stakes, real ones, where the protagonist might fail. I'm trying to write that kind of book. The seven-year-old wants humour and is an excellent critic of what is and isn't funny: she will stop reading immediately at a joke that doesn't land, which is brutal and accurate. The four-year-old currently prefers books about vehicles of any kind, which I find easier. I wrote my first children's book manuscript in 2022, during a long winter when the light returned very slowly. It was a picture book text, about a child who finds something in the snow that doesn't belong there. I read it to my youngest at the time. She said it was good, which from a four-year-old is a significant data point. The middle-grade novel I'm working on now is more ambitious and is aimed at my ten-year-old's current taste: real stakes, real failure possible, no adult swooping in at the last minute to fix it.