The Totally Tubular Travels of Josie Baker is a road-trip adventure story following Josie’s journey from invisibility to assertiveness during a summer week in 1986. It won two awards in the 2024 PNWA Literary Contest: “First Place” for Middle Grade and “Best Overall Story.” It’s currently a finalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) Gertrude Warner Awards for Middle Grade Fiction.
Twelve-year-old Josie is the daughter her parents never see. They’re too busy with her sister’s medical problems to attend Josie’s mathlete competitions or buy her a bra. When they travel for her sister’s latest operation, they ship Josie off to summer camp instead of bringing her along. When the camp bus accidentally leaves her behind at a rest stop in the middle of Washington state, Josie decides to get herself home without alerting her parents—maybe they’ll notice her for a change. She quickly gets mixed up with Denise, a street-smart runaway searching for her estranged mother. The girls are forced to rely on each other’s strengths to evade an escaped murderer and outwit a couple chasing them for the missing-person reward. When Denise’s life is in danger, Josie must harness the skills she’s learned from Denise to speak up and get help. Packed with adventure and heart, this novel is about learning to love those different from ourselves and being open to what they can teach us.
Tomoe and the Secret Island, a middle-grade historical novel set in seventeenth-century Japan, won FIRST PLACE in the 2019 Ink & Insights Writing Contest, Apprentice Division. It was also named JUDGES’ FAVORITE in the category of Middle Grade Historical Fiction.
Tomoe /toe-MOE-eh/ Hasegawa is an eleven-year-old girl in seventeenth-century Japan who aspires to be courageous like the samurai. She feels most alive when swimming at the beach or playing outdoors with her friends Sakuma and Kino. After Christianity is banned and persecutions intensify, Tomoe’s Catholic community flees to a remote island. They are pursued by the regional deputy who wishes to protect the nation from the corruption of foreign ideas. Along the way, Tomoe’s many attempts at bravery backfire and place her loved ones in great peril. Once on Kuroshima Island, she grieves the death of her father and the betrayal of a close friend. She eventually befriends the island’s mysterious hermit who teaches her to spearfish and models a courage different from the show-no-mercy credo of the samurai. When Tomoe unexpectedly comes face-to-face with the regional deputy, she must choose which version of courage she will use to protect her people.
The following are the books I co-authored with my fellow travel writers at Beginning Press. My maiden name—Laura Kraemer—appears on each of the covers.
January 1997
