The Search for a Star: A Crabby Abby Christmas by Ellen Kolman, illustrated by Kaelen Felix, is out today from Prolific Pulse Press.
It’s Christmas Eve in Ruby Reef. The ornaments are hung, the ribbons are wrapped, and the whole town is ready to celebrate. There’s just one problem: the town tree has no star.
If you’ve ever stood back to admire a Christmas tree and felt that something was missing, you already know how big a problem that is. And if you know Crabby Abby, you know she won’t sit still while it goes unsolved.
An Undersea Quest
Crabby Abby, the decorator crab who first won readers over in Crabby Abby the Decorator Crab’s Big Heart, sets off with her friends Daniel and Lavender to find a star for the tree before Christmas morning.
Their search takes them across the reef, past swaying kelp forests and glowing coral, under a bright Christmas Eve moon. Along the way, young readers will find plenty to point at, laugh about, and talk over together.
We won’t spoil where the search leads. But we will say that the star they find may not be the one anyone expected.
The Light That Shines Brightest
At its heart, this is a story about what really makes Christmas shine. As Abby, Daniel and Lavender search the reef, they discover that kindness and God’s love shine brightest of all.
That message is woven into an adventure, not tacked on at the end. Children experience it through the friends’ choices along the way, which makes it easy to talk about afterward: Who was kind? How did it help? Where do we see God’s love at Christmas?
Meet the Creators
Ellen Kolman, author. Ohio native Ellen Kolman is an award-winning author driven by a passion to teach children the love of Jesus. She has been teaching and entertaining children in church and Christian school settings for over 35 years. Her young students inspired her to write stories that help them understand kindness, forgiveness, empathy, and friendship. Ellen and her husband Andy have five adult children, five grandchildren, and a little white dog named Chip. Learn more on Ellen’s author page.
Kaelen Felix, illustrator. Kaelen Felix brings Ruby Reef to life with richly colored, hand-drawn art, from Abby’s mismatched shoes to every ornament on the tree. She is the author, illustrator, and designer of Wings and Whispers – Tales of Friendship, Volume 1, and has been creating children’s books for clients since 2018 in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a BFA in Illustration from Memphis College of Art.
Ways to Share It This Season
At home: Make it a Christmas Eve read-aloud, then let kids pick the star for your own tree.
In the classroom: Pair it with a lesson on kindness, or have students draw their own undersea Christmas tree.
In Sunday school or children’s church: Use the story to open a conversation about God’s love and the true light of Christmas.
As a gift: Tuck it into a stocking, an Advent basket, or a teacher gift bag.
Get Your Copy
The Search for a Star: A Crabby Abby Christmas is available now on Ellen Kolman. Order today and it can be under your tree well before Christmas Eve.
Gypsie-Ami Offenbacher-Ferris received this message from International Impact Book Awards about her win!
Following a thorough review of your work against our Standard of Excellence, our panel has selected you as a Distinguished Author of the International Impact Book Awards for your book, Reflections of a Woman’s Life.
This distinction is conferred upon a limited number of authors, leaders, and voices whose work demonstrates genuine, measurable impact on the readers and communities they serve. Your work reflected precisely the caliber this honor was created to recognize.
To be recognized as a Distinguished Author is to be positioned among a global community of authors whose words carry weight and whose ideas leave a lasting mark. This recognition is not given lightly. It is earned on the strength of what you created and it now belongs to you. It is a mark of distinction you carry into every room, every stage, and every conversation that follows.
Please join us as we honor this esteemed poet for this recognition!
Additionally… We received notifications that Peter Mladinic’s richly written review of Reflections of a Woman’s Life has been published by the esteemed Compulsive Reader journal.
Celebrate today as the new release of Red Threads and Silver Linings, A Woman’s Life in Haiku, One Bloody Drop at a Time!
Red Threads and Silver Linings is a haiku exploration of the female lifecycle, tracing womanhood through the intimate terrain of the body. Inspired partly by Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, Evershed moves through menarche, puberty, menstruation, fertility, conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum life, motherhood, menopause, and aging. Her short-form poetry illuminates the quiet power, vulnerability, and resilience held within the body’s cycles.
The collection catalogues the blood that marks each stage of women’s biological lives – periods, miscarriages, birthing blood – threading these experiences to seasonal change, the moon’s rhythm, and nature’s wider cycles. The “red threads” are crimson tides, blossoming flowers, the blood moon: metaphors for menarche’s first shock, miscarriage’s sadness, labor’s endurance, and postpartum’s complexity. The “silver linings” gather later pleasures – reblooming azaleas, HRT’s sticky petals, a bruised peach scented with second chances. Grief and loss coexist here with endurance, humor, desire, and deepening self-knowledge.
Organized into sections like It’s Just a Period She’s Going Through, Childbirth and Other Horrors, and An Old Wife’s Tale, the book blends the personal with the mythical, the natural world with the biological. Daughters and mothers share pages with ghosts of earlier selves and ancestral echoes. Through haiku’s precision, the result is a map of womanhood both grounded and lyrical.
At once meditation and celebration, the collection offers poems that are tender, raw, and unflinchingly honest – honoring the shifting landscape of a woman’s life from girlhood’s first flush to menopause’s soft letting-go, and the humanity found in every bleed, every change, every reckoning of living in a woman’s body.
Catch this video of my interview with author Adele Evershed.
Prefer the Podcast?
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About Adele Evershed
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem, she is co-editor of Thin Skin Journal. Her work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s est, Presence, Prune Juice, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press), the short story collection Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publications), three novellas-in-flash, and the haiku collections Pressed Between Palms (Nun Prophet Press) and They F#% You Up Your Mam and Dad (Cuttlefish Books). When she’s not writing, Adele can be found drinking PG Tips tea and trawling thrift shops for teacups to add to her collection.
As a teacher, I will always remain a student. In the classroom of life, l wish to work with and educate others. Whether you’re a teacher, student, or just your average person, here are a few of my "TEACHERble" moments.
