It is my honour to be part of the Chasing the Shy Town blog tour. Chasing the Shy Town was released this month June 2024 and is written by Erika McGann, beautifully illustrated by Toni Galmés and published by Little Island Books.

Blurb

Senan uses his binoculars to spy out the Shy Town, a sweet little place on a hill, with winding streets and red and yellow roofs. Senan calls it the Shy Town because it often hides and is hard to find. He tells his next-door friend Joshua about the Shy Town, and they set off, with Senan’s grandmother in a ramshackle wheelchair, to find this elusive place. Along the way they make friends with Paperboy. Who is, as you’d expect, a boy made of paper.

With the help of a kruckle (a sort of Shy Town creature) that they meet on their journey, they find the Shy Town, only its real name is Perfection, because it is absolutely perfect. But all is not well in Perfection: the inhabitants are constantly worrying about making it more and more perfect. But since more perfect than perfect is an impossibility, they are constantly exhausted.

What can Senan and friends do to save the kruckles from their obsession with perfection?

My stop on the tour takes the form of a special post from author Erika McGann about exploring difficult emotions in the safety of a story.

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Exploring Difficult Emotions in the Safety of a Story

By Erika McGann

When I was a kid my parents gave me a huge hardback notebook to write in. They also paid me 10p a day to write in it. (In our house, artistic endeavours were bribe-worthy). I still don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing for my parents to pay me to write, but it certainly worked as an incentive. I wrote a lot, and most of my stories were filled with monsters and demons and things that go bump in the night. I had fun writing them, but I know now I was also exorcising my own demons. I was very fearful as a kid. When the bedroom light went off at night, furniture and discarded clothes became unnerving shapes in the dark; I heard the creaking of floorboards that couldn’t possibly be caused by human feet; and I could spend half the night staring at a wardrobe door standing ajar, wondering if I had unwittingly left it open or if something else had opened it after I’d climbed into bed. I think of those stories in that big hardback now as little inoculations – I was practising being scared; filling my mind with frightening things that I knew for sure weren’t real because I’d made them up.

Not every kid writes, but a lot of kids read, and books offer that opportunity to explore difficult emotions in a safe place. My latest book, Chasing the Shy Town, is about a young boy named Senan who has no desire for adventure. But when he spots the Shy Town – a mysterious hilltop town that vanishes and reappears along the horizon – his fearless best friend, Joshua, and his no-nonsense grandmother are keen to give chase. ‘Senan is afraid to look afraid’ and gets dragged along for the ride.

The book examines Senan’s fear of the unknown and his worry about losing his best friend when a newcomer joins the crew, but it also explores the pressure to be perfect. When the group finally track down the Shy Town they find the residents riddled with anxiety, desperately striving for something they can never achieve. Being able to delve into that issue with young readers is much easier in the context of fantasy. Using somewhat outlandish but likeable characters to whom the children can relate, the fantastical setting allows me to take a gentle approach to a subject that might otherwise be very troubling for the reader – the pressure to be more than you are – and the hope is that this little inoculation of worry will make the issue more manageable in real life.

As a writer, it feels good to be able to offer children these moments of ‘practice’ that may serve them well into the future. It also feels wonderful to know that they can indulge in the characters’ positive feelings too – the excitement and sense of freedom in setting off on an epic adventure, with wild storms, bizarre creatures and magnificent secrets – all from the safety of a comfy chair at home.

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About the Author

Erika McGann is an award-winning children’s author based in Dublin.

She has written a wide range of children’s books, including Where Are You Puffling? (with illustrator Gerry Daly) and Tabitha Plimtock and the Edge of the World (with illustrations by Phillip Cullen), which was awarded a White Raven by the International Youth Library.

About the Illustrator

Toni Galmés has always liked to tell stories through his drawings. Toni was born in Mallorca, a sunny Mediterranean island. Later he moved to Barcelona to study Fine Arts. There he learned, read, and worked as a storyboard artist for film and advertising.

He fell in love with a bookseller and, from that love, his work as an illustrator of children’s books and graphic novels was born. Toni’s work includes picture books, novels and graphic novels published in Spain and France, with publishers such as Penguin Random House, La Galera, Bindi Books and the prestigious Franco- Belgian comic publishers, Dupuis and Delcourt.

I would like to thank Erika McGann for her time in writing about her experiences in the fear of the unknown and pressure to be perfect and how she developed these fears into her latest novel, Chasing the Shy Town. I would also like to thank Antonia Wilkinson for inviting me on this tour. Thank you.

To follow the rest of the tour take a look at the schedule below:

I would like to thank Antonia Wilkinson for inviting me on this tour. Thank you,