Conflict can be a tricky element to write in children’s books. You don’t want a conflict to become too scary or intense, but you also need it in order to teach your readers a life lesson that is crucial to telling a story. Because of this, I find a lot of conflicts in children’s books to be lackluster and with no real teachable moment to share.
Author Colleen Olle has managed to conquer this issue with her children’s book, Sophia and Sinclair Get Lost. Check out my review of the story followed by an interview with Olle below!
Sophia and Sinclair Get Lost plot summary
One autumn day, a rabbit named Sophia and a turtle named Sinclair decide to take a walk through the forest. On the way, they ask the animals they meet if they’d like to stop and play. However, many of the animals are too busy preparing for the winter ahead.
One animal, a horse named Charlotte, agrees to play, but she first had to finish carting pumpkins in a wagon. While waiting, Sophia and Sinclair argue over how to spend their time.
Sophia finds a leftover harvest hay maze from the Halloween season, and the two set about exploring it. While doing so, they become lost, and they split up in individual attempts to find their own way out.
The two friends begin to regret their decisions when they run into trouble. However, each of them thinks about what the other would do in the situation, and the combination of their two individual methods lead them back to each other and out of the maze.
The story
What starts out as a simple walk between two friends leads to a 41-page adventure that tests, and ultimately strengthens, that friendship. The forest and its surroundings are simultaneously picturesque and dangerous, particularly for two vulnerable little animals.
I was pleasantly surprised by the twists and turns that this story takes. I’ve read plenty of picture books through the years about animals that go missing in what is essentially their own backyard. I expected that Sophia and Sinclair would simply take a wrong turn through the woods and ask for help from the local animals in finding their way back.
Instead, the stakes are heightened when our heroes have a falling out and are separated by stubbornness. However, they find that it’s scary to be alone, and those who do try to help them don’t know them as well as the other does or take their predicament as seriously as they do. When they emerge from the maze, they find themselves more appreciative of each other and more flexible when it comes to making decisions, realizing that it’s better to work together than to butt heads and have to face their problems alone.
The characters
Our two heroes are complete opposites, as many friends are. Sinclair is cautious and slow while Sophia is impulsive and always in a hurry. The two obviously care about each other, but they also have different ways of approaching their adventure.
Still, the two also have a lot of similarities. They both are more concerned about play than work, they have a similar sense of humor, and they both rely on each other for support.
The other characters in the story take more minor positions. However, they each bring a distinct personality to the table and play crucial roles in the plot.
Charlotte the horse is very disciplined, though she still likes to have fun. The beavers are workaholics but still friendly and good natured. The moles have a very narrow point of view, and the mice are very absent-minded.
Each character brings something to the table in order to help set the scene and bring the story to life. In many cases, they even inadvertently add to the conflict. However, they are used well and create a very strong world building element for the tale.
The illustrations
The illustrations are by Marcy Tippmann. They are full of warm colors and very distinct movements of the characters that bring out their personalities and the strong dialogue.
The story is set in the fall, and there are plenty of leafy backgrounds, sprawling farmlands where pumpkins are being harvested, and an intricate “Harvest Hay Maze.” There is enough detail to fill the page and catch your eye but also enough space to insert the text without getting in the way of the main focus of the page.
The illustrations also add clarity to the story where the narration can tend to be unclear, such as what objects or animals they are referencing in a certain scene or who is speaking. There are even some inside jokes that the illustrations add to the story, such as misread signs and references of the human world that the animals do not understand.
My recommendation
Sophia and Sinclair Get Lost carries with it a fun yet poignant message about working together and learning from each other. I liked how their little adventure helped Sophia and Sinclair learn to appreciate each other and what they consider their personality quirks. It’s a message we all need reminded of in our adult relationships.
I do feel that the storytelling itself is a little unclear at times. It’s hard to know who’s speaking, and you sometimes only know what the characters are talking about by looking at the pictures. It’s almost written in a comic book-like style, but it suffers from lack of word and thought bubbles and could use a little more stage direction in order to make its details a bit clearer.
There are also some tough vocabulary words for younger readers. It would be necessary for an adult to be nearby in order to help an early reader work out some of the language. But it’s also a good learning tool to use context clues to discover new words.
Ultimately, Sophia and Sinclair Get Lost is a very eye-catching, action-packed morality tale that is full enough to hold a reader’s attention but simple enough for them to get the message across. It’s also a perfect autumn read and a good one to return to whenever a young reader needs to be reminded that the things that make them different from their friends are the things they should celebrate and learn from the most.
My rating
Buy it!
Buy a copy of Sophia and Sinclair Get Lost here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
An interview with Colleen Olle
How long did it take to write this book from the time you came up with the idea to the time you finished the final draft? Were you surprised by any elements of the picture book writing process?
I brainstormed ideas for this picture book in the fall of 2021 and wrote the first draft at the beginning of December. I continued revising and in July 2022 created a dummy, or a working model.
In mid-August, I sent illustrator Marcy Tippman a dummy with art notes, and, based on her and other people’s feedback, continued revising until November. By the end of that month, Marcy had finished all the rough sketches. As she worked on the color illustrations, I continued to tweak the text and achieved a final draft by the end of February 2023.
Since this was my second picture book, I knew better what to expect. However, in terms of story, I had fun playing with the craft element of parallel stories.
Because Sophia and Sinclair argue and go their separate ways, I needed to create two distinct and engaging stories that readers could easily track. Some of the content and language would reinforce the parallelism of their journeys. For instance, shortly after they separate and get lost, each character reacts viscerally to their predicament. Sophia’s heart sinks, while Sinclair’s stomach knots, and each of them subsequently shouts for the other: “Where are you?”
I also wanted the beavers to play a role in this story, but I wanted to avoid complicating the text and increasing the word count. Consequently, I created a short, wordless, parallel story for the beavers that appears in the bottom left-hand corner on three separate pages. Although the animal characters have no idea who is doing what, readers can see and appreciate how this parallel story impacts what happens to Sophia and Sinclair.
The animals in the story have very cute, old-fashioned names. How did you come up with the names for the characters?
That’s a great question with various answers. There’s both a short and a long story regarding the origin of Sophia’s name.
The short version is that she bears the middle name of one of my nieces. The longer story harkens back to 2015 when I visited my sister and her family in Wisconsin. It was close to Easter, so I brought three small stuffed rabbits for my two nephews and niece. Each rabbit bore the name of its owner.
To my surprise, when I returned home, my husband gave me my own small stuffed rabbit for Easter. Considering her to be a cousin to my niece’s rabbit, I bestowed upon her my niece’s middle name, Sophia.
Later that year, my husband returned from a business trip and gave me a small stuffed turtle. The smile on the turtle’s face looked so purely happy and sincere, I wanted a name that reflected this, hence Sinclair.
The beavers first appear in Sophia and Sinclair Go on an Adventure!, a picture book that my husband and I co-authored. Given that the mother beaver is down-to-earth, loving, and protective, I decided to name her Hattie.
Short for Harriet, Hattie means “home or estate ruler,” which she certainly is! I liked the sound of the name Eugene and how it paired well with Hattie.
For the four beaver kits, I chose three names beginning with B and the youngest’s name beginning with A. Kind of a joke, in that I’ve known families in which all the kids’ names begin with the same letter. In the beavers’ family, though, by the time they got to the youngest, the parents were either too exhausted to come up with another B name or finally inspired to try something different.
Sometimes names just bubble up from the subconscious. The name Charlotte came to my husband when he was thinking of Sophia and Sinclair’s horse friend.
I wanted the deer mouse brothers, who are practically twins, to have names beginning with the same letter. I liked the name Timothy but took a while to settle on Titus. In fact, what I didn’t immediately realize is that these two names appear in a book I read nearly every day.
Finally, Olympia’s name is somewhat ironic. Given that she’s a mole and lives underground, I thought it would be funny and uplifting for her to be named after Mount Olympus, home of the Greek deities and the Olympics. As for the names being old-fashioned, that may stem from all the stories I read when I was a kid.
The story is set in the autumn. Did you have any specific reason for using this particular season?
Yes. The story in the first picture book takes place during the summer. As a fan of Katy Hudson’s four seasonal Rabbit, Tortoise, Squirrel, Beaver, and Bird books, I knew I wanted Sophia and Sinclair to enjoy an adventure in another season. Since it happened to be autumn when I started this new book, I set the story in the fall.
Did you have any specific directions for the illustrator, Marcy Tippmann?
Oh, yes, a lot. As an indie picture book writer, I need to not only write the story but also brainstorm illustration ideas.
For both books, I created a dummy, which is a mock-up of the work-in-progress that includes the text and illustrations and helps with the rhythm and pacing of the story. Since I’m not an illustrator, I made very basic sketches and then used words to describe what I envisioned for each illustration.
Once I had everything in place, Marcy and I talked through each page and spread. She asked questions and made her own suggestions as well.
During the first round, Marcy created black-and-white sketches to focus on the characters’ shapes, expressions, and positions. I’d provide feedback and she would make adjustments.
The next round, she added color and fine-tuned the illustrations based on her own ideas and on my feedback. For instance, Marcy had the idea of showing a sideview of Sinclair dining underground, so that readers could see both the hole above and Olympia’s tunnel and kitchen. Marcy’s great with perspective and color.
For this same page, I suggested adding a tablecloth on Olympia’s kitchen table beneath the pile of worms Sinclair snacks on. We also discussed the placement of the text in relation to the illustrations.
Do you have a favorite page?
That’s a hard one. I like every page for different reasons. Two highlights, though, are the page with the hawk flying above and frightening Sophia and Sinclair and the Kaboom page that shows the beavers celebrating in the lower corner and Olympia and Sinclair startled up into the air in the upper corner.
Do you have a favorite character?
No. However, since I spend the most time with Sophia and Sinclair, I know them best.
What advice do you have for readers who may struggle with compromise or find themselves regularly frustrated by a friend or family member’s tendencies to do things differently from themselves?
A challenging question! Recently, I read An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us by Ed Yong. He talks about Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, which describes an animal’s perceptual world.
Uexküll compared an animal’s body to a house. Each house has a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and many tactile windows, and all these windows open onto a garden. The number, placement, and build of the windows shape a creature’s view of the garden.
Moreover, the garden appears not as a section of the larger world but as the only world that belongs to the house, its Umwelt. Each animal, each person perceives the garden in a unique way. Each animal’s and human’s Umwelt feels all encompassing, yet in reality, it’s limited, which means my way of seeing or doing something is not the only way.
More simply, I’d say, if I feel frustrated that someone is doing something differently than I would like, I need to stop and ask myself, “How important is it?” Will what I’m fretting about now matter tomorrow or next week? If not, I should let it go and accept and appreciate different perspectives and ideas.
Compromise allows me to perceive the rightness of other ways. In fact, I might even like the “new” or “different” way better than my own.
What’s next for you?
If all goes well, another adventure in a new season for Sophia and Sinclair.
Author links
Links will open in a new tab.
Pin it!
Share your comments