A Free Spirit Collaboration

By Claire Kirch, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 4/28/2008

Free Spirit Publishing, which has specialized for the past 25 years in publishing books concerning the emotional and social development of children, is collaborating with the Jacob Wetterling Foundation, a Minnesota-based organization that advocates for missing and exploited children, to release two books on child safety this spring.

The company will publish two books by Alison Feigh, a child safety specialist with the Wetterling Foundation, and once a classmate of the kidnapped boy for whom the foundation is named. I Can Play It Safe is a picture book about personal safety, while the second book, On Those Runaway Days, provides children with coping strategies to use when they feel running away from home might be a solution to their problems.

“This furthers our mission,” says Judy Galbraith, Free Spirit’s publisher, “and it furthers the Wetterling Foundation’s mission as well. We all want to make children safe, but we don’t want to scare them. These books are thoughtfully and responsibly written in tackling these topics.”

Both hardcover books will retail for $14.95. I Can Play It Safe will be released with a 6,000-copy initial print run, On Those Runaway Days with a 4,000-copy initial print run.