Sammy’s Attic
by Benjamin Gallup
Kids are loving my latest book, Sammy’s Attic. It’s easy to read, enjoy, and connect with. It has big ideas and big feelings that connect with their big minds and big hearts.
Sammy’s Attic helps kids to process anger and grief in healthy ways. It also illustrates positive conflict resolution through restorative justice.
Sammy’s Attic is perfect for classrooms, youth-work circles, and story time at home.
Sammy’s hometown burned down in a wildfire. Since the fire took his home, he has developed an anger problem, which gets him into trouble at his new school. He invents a snowy, imaginary world and a friend, named Tu, in the attic of his new home to help himself heal. Tu helps Sammy find his way into a new life and new school, where Sammy must make friends and deal with a bully. Sammy can only make peace with these profound changes by following the smell of smoke from below the floorboards of his bedroom, where he finds a world, and himself, on fire.
Sammy’s Attic does not read as didactic or moralistic, but it does aim to teach emotional intelligence (especially to boys) by normalizing empathy, crying, restorative justice, and other aspects of well-being that masculine gender socialization often discourages. There is a nearly total absence of middle grades books published in the last five years to sympathetically assist boys resolving anger.
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About Me
I am here to enjoy life while making the world a better place. I have been serving as a school librarian for six years. Before that I taught 1st, 4th, and 5th grade and lead trainings in positive masculinity and undoing racism. My creative work is based on my personal healing experiences and my relationship with young readers.
Benjamin Gallup, author and illustrator 