Some books you publish. Some books teach you what publishing a child actually means. Hopscotch did the second thing.
It is an anthology of children's fiction, nine tales by nine young authors, published in 2025. Time travellers and ghost ships. Butterfly battles and a magical dog. The stories hop between worlds, which is exactly where the title comes from.
The range is the point
Read the contents page and the first thing you notice is that no two writers were chasing the same kind of story. Aanya Taneja writes across galaxies and generations. Aarjav Amit Singh writes with a detective's eye for detail. Ridhvi Bansal builds time-bending adventures about people coming together to protect a shared world.
We did not hand these children a theme and ask them to colour inside it. We asked what they wanted to write, and then we got out of the way.
What we chose not to do
The easiest thing for any adult editor is to smooth a young writer's sentences until they sound like an adult wrote them. We do the opposite.
A child's voice is the whole reason the book exists. Edit the grammar, never the voice.
That rule is harder to follow than it sounds. It means leaving in the odd turn of phrase that an adult never would have written, because that phrase is the kid.
Hopscotch is on Amazon and in bookstores now. Nine names on the cover, every one of them real.
