Welcome to Palmista Press: Children's Author Reed Seedwood

We are delighted to welcome a new author to the growing Palmista Press family.

Reed Seedwood joins Palmista Press as a children's author with a particular talent for combining stories, puzzles, humour and learning into books designed to keep young readers actively involved from beginning to end.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly given our publishing philosophy, Reed doesn't think in terms of just one book.

He thinks in series.

That makes him a very natural fit for Palmista Press.

Meet Reed Seedwood

Reed Seedwood writes children's puzzle books built around a simple idea we immediately loved:

A story you read. A puzzle you solve. Every single chapter.

Rather than separating the story from the activities, Reed makes the puzzles part of the adventure itself.

Children read a chapter to discover what has happened and, importantly, what they need to look for.

Then they turn the page.

The story gives way to a large illustrated puzzle where the reader has to help solve the problem before continuing the adventure.

Read.

Discover the problem.

Solve the puzzle.

Continue the story.

It's a format designed to encourage children not only to look carefully, but to read carefully.

Introducing The Impossible Experiments of Nico Neutrino

Reed's first series with Palmista Press is:

The Impossible Experiments of Nico Neutrino

And Nico is not exactly your average young scientist.

Nico Neutrino is a boy with his own laboratory.

Admittedly, his laboratory is also his bedroom.

His assistant is Botnic, a small grey robot Nico built himself from spare parts and a considerable amount of stubbornness.

Together, Nico and Botnic invent things that have never been invented before.

Unfortunately, inventing something that has never existed also means nobody really knows what's going to happen when you switch it on.

Things disappear.

Things get duplicated.

Things end up where they definitely shouldn't be.

And that's when Nico needs the reader's help.

Around Twenty Chapters. Around Twenty Puzzles.

Each book contains roughly twenty chapters and roughly twenty corresponding puzzles.

But children won't simply be solving the same "find the hidden object" puzzle again and again.

The challenges change throughout the adventure.

Readers might need to find an exact matching pair, identify something that has disappeared, locate several identical objects, spot the object without a partner, count items, find multiple pairs, search for matches hidden far apart or navigate a maze.

The important part is that children need to read the instructions first.

They can't know what they're searching for unless they've paid attention to the story and the puzzle instructions.

That's one of the quiet educational ideas sitting underneath all the chaos.

Real Science Hidden Inside the Fun

Nico's experiments might be ridiculous.

The science lessons aren't.

Throughout the series, Reed introduces young readers to simple scientific ideas without turning the books into textbooks.

Children discover that laboratory safety matters.

They learn why scientists should keep their workspace organised and why careful observation is important before reaching a conclusion.

They encounter concepts involving electricity, resistors and magnetism.

They learn that iron and steel react differently to magnets than materials such as copper and aluminium.

Perhaps most importantly, they begin encountering one of the fundamental ideas behind science:

A theory is an idea you test.

And experiments don't always produce the result you expected.

Sometimes they produce something considerably stranger.

And Then There's the Purple Chicken

We should probably mention the chicken.

There is a purple chicken wandering through The Impossible Experiments of Nico Neutrino.

Why?

That's an excellent question.

She appears throughout the illustrations across the series, often hiding somewhere she has absolutely no business being.

Finding her isn't part of the official puzzle.

She's just being cheeky.

Consider her a little extra challenge for particularly observant readers.

Five Adventures Are Already Planned

One of the reasons Reed Seedwood is such a good match for Palmista Press is that Nico's adventures have been conceived from the beginning as a continuing series.

The first five books are:

Book One: The Duplicate Disaster
Nico builds Botnic and invents a machine capable of copying things. Unfortunately, it copies the wrong thing.

Book Two: The Factory Fiasco
Botnic needs a Super Power Cell, which means a trip to an enormous robot factory.

Book Three: The Alien Arrival
Visitors arrive from space—and suddenly nothing seems to stay where it was put.

Book Four: The Dinosaur Detour
Nico travels back to the age of dinosaurs and somehow manages to return home with a new pet.

Book Five: The Proton Problem
Nico goes to work for the great Professor Morton Proton.

The books are designed to be best enjoyed in order, allowing children to follow Nico, Botnic and their increasingly impossible experiments from one adventure to the next.

Each story, however, can also be enjoyed on its own.

For Young Readers—and the Grown-Ups Reading With Them

The Impossible Experiments of Nico Neutrino is aimed primarily at children aged 5 to 9.

Younger children can enjoy solving the visual puzzles while a parent or other grown-up reads the story aloud.

Newly confident readers can tackle the books independently, reading the instructions themselves before searching through each illustration.

And because the puzzles change throughout the books, the reader isn't simply following the story.

They're participating in it.

Every book also concludes with a What Did We Learn? section, reinforcing some of the ideas encountered during the adventure, while puzzle answers are provided at the back.

Welcome to Palmista Press, Reed

At Palmista Press, we love stories that don't have to end when the first book does.

Reed Seedwood brings something completely new to our catalogue: a children's series combining storytelling, visual puzzles, recurring characters, humour and accessible science.

We're very pleased to have him—and Nico, Botnic and one particularly troublesome purple chicken—joining Palmista Press.

We'll be sharing much more about The Impossible Experiments of Nico Neutrino as the series moves towards publication.

For now, we'd simply like to say:

Welcome to Palmista Press, Reed Seedwood.

We have a feeling things are about to get experimental.