The Guardian of the Stars – The Journey of Anais with the Wind nominated Best English language children’s novel.
Sometimes there is a difference between what the powerful marketing machine of the book industry says and what readers actually like to read and ultimately buy. This is not a criticism to the book industry, which indeed does a good job. Rather, this is to demonstrate how fast the book market evolves. Faster even than the notoriously mindful book industry. This is certainly the case with Davide Amante’s book The Guardian of the Stars – The Journey of Anais with the Wind. Released with a small publishing house, top seller and translated in at least four countries, sold mostly online, the author went unnoticed, at least so far, by big publishing houses. Is it possible that this author keeps on publishing with a small, almost unknown publishing house? Yes it is. And the author is perfectly happy with it, he tells us, at least at the time of release of this article.
And now The Guardian of the Stars – The Journey of Anais with the Wind, has been nominated Best English language children’s novel. By a large number of readers. In nothing less than 5 countries. This is the magic of the publishing industry.
We have to say that being all our editorial board enthusiastic about this author, who published four novels and is working on new novels, we immediately welcomed the nomination of The Guardian of the Stars – The Journey of Anais with the Wind to Best English language children’s novel.
When we launched the survey the reaction of readers went well beyond our expectation. And we’re talking about readers from five different countries that answered in the thousands and explained why this book should definitely win our survey.
The book was released by novelist Davide Amante in 2019 and since then it outpaced many competitors and expectations. Even more so if you consider that the novel was released by a small publishing house and was never supported by the marketing machine available to major publishing houses.
As the book amassed impressive sales numbers, and it is significant that the book was mostly sold online, it also became a reference text for schoolteachers practicing Dialogic Reading, even more so considering it is the central text used to teach this practice worldwide by DMA Education a website entirely dedicated to Dialogic Reading for teachers and parents https://www.dmaeducation.com/en. After all, the author, an expert in Dialogic Reading, worked directly with some public and private schools in Europe precisely to help develop a protocol dedicated to this practice.
In two years from it’s release the book was already translated in three languages and we can expect more to come from this exceptional novel.
The book is written with an incredibly modern style, however as you read it you immediately have the impression you’re holding in your hands a classic of children’s literature.
The story is original, you cannot find anything similar among children’s books whether classic or contemporary. The protagonist is an 8 years old girl, that spends the summer holidays on a small island. A strong wind storm engulfs the island and from that moment the girl discovers a whole new world. The Wind, The Forest of Talking Trees, te Wolf, the family of Dolphins, a lonely grandfather, the inhabitants of a village who live and walk all bent towards the sea, the sailors of an offbeat sailboat with an inaccurate compass, and many other will lead the girl to the magic midsummer party on a beach by the other side of the island. And there, the girl will finally discover the other side of things, the one you reach with your soul, and the meaning of life.
It is even said that Audi car brand, in a famous commercial ad featuring the Audi e-tron and a tilted world, was inspired by this novel for its commercials. Actually if you look at all the people tilted to one side you have exactly the same impression when reading the second chapter of the novel, where all the people living in a small village are tilted to one side, the one towards the sea.
Novelist Davide Amante certainly did an outstanding job with this unique children’s novel and the fact that it won the Best English language children’s novel award come with no surprise to us.
