Closet of Dreams

In “Closet of Dreams” (March 2024), the debut title in “The Adventures of Child and Gamma” chapter book series, brother and sister co-authors Mark Ukra and Tara Mesalik MacMahon tell young readers, “When your fears disappear, your dreams appear!”

An aspiring pitcher with a mean fastball, nine-year-old Child wants nothing more than to be on his local little league team. But the team is dwindling and to make matters worse, Child has a gang of bullies targeting him. He confides in his grandmother, Gamma, and she sends him to the Closet of Dreams, a place she invented for Child so that he’d have a safe place to go when he gets scared.

A star-pitcher back in her day, Gamma now works at the Kids Park where retired circus animals spend their days. When Child sees his animal friends have hidden talents, he turns to them for help. Can Child put his fears aside and save his team?

In this charming chapter book, readers will delight in a magical story of friendship and talking animals. The authors were inspired by their own childhood’s “closet of dreams,” where the make-believe world of Child and Gamma originally came to life.

Co-authors Mark Ukra (Child) and Tara Mesalik MacMahon (Gamma) are brother and sister and lifelong best friends. Mark is the author of The Ultimate Tea Diet (HarperCollins), and Tara is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and award-winning author of Barefoot Up the Mountain (Open Country Press). Her poems appear widely in literary journals and anthologies, including those from Red Hen Press, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Jabberwock Review, among many others.

Mark and Tara based Closet of Dreams upon their own childhood Closet of Dreams, where the make-believe world of Child and Gamma came to life. Mark was “Child”; Tara was “Gamma.” Book II is already in the works, where Child and his friends race to rescue Starr, a magical baby elephant in Botswana.