LLZ Books

LLZ Books publishes books featuring folks who work together to make the world–at least, their corner of it–more fair and friendly to all. As specific, and as broad, as that.

LLZ books published to date have been written by or with Juliana Barnet, but we hope to encourage others to write works featuring activist characters and settings.

For the children’s books of Neighborhood Novelists JB functions as an alchemist, helping 8-10 year olds create a novel through a fun and mysterious process of talking and writing and reading and wandering around looking at things. These books don’t feature activists per se, but they are about social issues that the characters tackle and solve collectively, ending up with more fairness than there was at the beginning of the novel.

Rainwood House Sings, a social justice mystery

by Juliana Barnet w/Sophie Barnet-Higgins

A community activist accused of shooting a cop flees his DC neighborhood and joins, incognito, a collective household at Rainwood House, the crumbling home of a beleaguered University of Maryland groundskeeper Marlie Mendíval and her bat- and book-loving granddaughter Samantha. Increasingly tangled in each others’ lives, the characters tackle racial profiling, sexual harassment, religious confusion and musical plumbing, joining forces with glamorous union shop steward Laranda and a crew of lively supporters to create a workers’ movement, a friendship club, a local civil rights history museum and a present-day Underground Railroad stop.

RAINWOOD HOUSE SINGS, Book 1 in the Rainwood House Social Justice Mystery Series, is part of Life in the Liberated Zone’s initiative to promote engaging, truthful fiction featuring activists living in the belly of the beast while struggling to transform it. Rainwood House Burns, Book 2 in the series, will be out in 2018.

Zombie Elementary

Collectively written and illustrated by the Neighborhood Novelists of Thomas Stone Elementary School in Mt. Rainier, MD.

Jake, a cute greenish zombie, comes to Samantha’s school wanting to study like the human scholars. Unfortunately, his brother James (also surprisingly cute for a zombie) comes, too, and he wants to take a shortcut. Instead of studying he wants to get smart by consuming the brains of humans at the school, who also turn into brain-eating zombies. Samantha and her friends must overcome prejudices and fears to work with Jake and other “learning zombies,” who must in turn battle their own mistrust of the humans, to tackle the growing plague of brain-eating zombies threatening to destroy their school. Intense discussion and growing cooperation lead to a clever solution involving gummy worms and a most unappetizing potion. Zombie Elementary is a collective novel written and illustrated by thirty third graders, with the help of writer Juliana Barnet. For more about Neighborhood Novelists and collective novel-writing for children, click HERE.