The Coloring Book Has Passports Now.

Kid’s Books

Apr 17

A book made for toddlers who are learning America is now available in America and in Denmark. I did not see Denmark coming. Nobody did.

I have an update and it is a good one. My First American Coloring Book is now available in two places that are not Amazon, which already feels like a plot twist worth announcing.

A book about American toddler life, made by a Brazilian author, illustrated by a Brazilian illustrator, is now on sale in the United States and in Denmark. I keep saying this out loud to see if it sounds less surreal. It does not.

🇺🇸 UNITED STATES

Barnes & Noble

One of the largest and most iconic book retailers in America. If you know, you know. If you don't, it's basically a bookshop the size of a small country.

🇩🇰 DENMARK

Saxo

Denmark's first and largest online bookstore, founded in 1961. Millions of titles. The Danish equivalent of the big one.

🤔 A REASONABLE QUESTION YOU MIGHT BE ASKING

Why is a book called My First American Coloring Book available in Denmark? That is a fair question and I appreciate you asking it. The honest answer is: because books go where books go, and apparently Danish readers are also curious about pies, Halloween, and what a school bus looks like. Or perhaps it is for the many families in Denmark who are raising children between cultures and languages. Which, as it turns out, is what all of my books are about. So. That tracks.

A coloring book for two-year-olds is now available in two countries on two continents. The two-year-olds are unbothered by this news. I am not.

Barnes & Noble is one of the most established book retailers in the United States — the kind of name that, when you see your title listed there, you have to do a small private celebration and then act normal for the rest of the day. I did the celebration. The acting normal is still pending.

Saxo is Denmark's largest online bookstore, founded in 1961, with millions of titles across every format. It is, by any measure, the place Danes go to find books. And now one of those books is mine. Written in English. About America. Available in Copenhagen. I love this so much.

THE PART THAT IS GENUINELY FUNNY

A Brazilian author writes a book about American culture for toddlers. Denmark buys it.

If this is not the most immigrant-author thing that has ever happened, I do not know what is. The book crossed more borders than the toddlers it was made for. They are still working on walking in a straight line. The book is doing international distribution. We are all growing at our own pace.

My First American Coloring Book is available now on Barnes & Noble in the US, on Saxo in Denmark, and on Amazon. Wherever you are, wherever your toddler is, there is probably a way to get this into their hands.

More countries to follow, hopefully. The book seems to have places to be. I am going to let it go.

Delighted, grateful, and mildly baffled by Denmark,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ MY FIRST AMERICAN COLORING BOOK · BARNES & NOBLE · SAXO · AVAILABLE NOW ✦

Buy U.S

Buy Denmark

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.