Celebrating Noellie's Eleventh Book!

On Eleven Little Books, and the Gratitude That Holds Them

This October, with the light falling low and golden across the table where most of these pages were first imagined, I find myself counting eleven small books standing side by side, and I can only receive them as the gift they have always been.

The Classics, Retold in Rhyme

Six of them belong to Noellie Las Classiques, where the oldest and most beloved stories in our literary inheritance are gathered down into gentle verse for the smallest readers: The Odyssey, where a weary wanderer finds his long way home across the wine-dark sea, and Hamlet, with its grieving prince beneath the castle stars. Beside them rest The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, whose bells ring out over a cathedral I have come to love by another name in my own life, and Dracula and Frankenstein, those two shadowed tales that turned out, when softened for little hands, to be quiet stories about longing to be loved. Alice in Wonderland completes the six, tumbling down her rabbit hole into a world where curiosity is always rewarded with wonder.

The Fairytales

Three more were born from the fairytales our grandmothers once told us by lamplight, each one retold in its own original verse: Sleeping Beauty, who wakes into a morning she never imagined, Beauty and the Beast, where tenderness slowly unlocks a frightened and enchanted heart, and Cinderella, whose gown and glass slipper still carry every little girl's dream of being seen and chosen.

The Two That Began It All

The last two on this shelf were truly the first, and they will always hold a particular tenderness for me, since Star's Christmas Wish, illustrated so lovingly by Lauren Austin, and Jesus' Friend the Donkey, painted with such grace by Henry Setiawan, were the books that taught me this whole beautiful work was possible.

Beside the Eleven

Resting just beside these eleven on the shelf are a few more little books I hold close to my heart: the prayers of Noellie Las Sagradas, The Magnificat, Our Father, and Hail Mary, whose sacred words belong to the Church and were only mine to cradle and pass down, along with Baby's Roman Missal and Declaration of Independence for Little Patriots, which I retold in my own original verse. Though I keep them set gently apart from this count, I treasure each of them every bit as dearly as the rest.

A Quiet Thank You

To every family who has carried one of these books home, to every mother who has written me a kind note after reading one aloud at bedtime, and to the Lord who placed these stories in my hands long before I knew what to do with them, I offer my whole and grateful heart.

For Those Who Held the Thread

Every book is sewn together along a hidden spine, and the people who believed in me have been that gentle thread all along, quietly holding my scattered pages together on the days I could not hold them myself. Your love is stitched softly into every one of these little books, and I will carry my gratitude for you through every page still waiting to be written.

Thank you, Rory Noelle