The Light Keepers/Cuvarice Svjetla

All children are born carrying a light. They just don't know it yet.

When Vedrana comes home from school with tears on her cheeks - laughed at for the way her voice trembles when she sings - her grandmother does not tell her to be braver. She opens a book.

A book bound in dark leather, painted by hand, holding seven evenings, seven lights, and seven grandmothers. One each night, by the warm tiled stove, Baka Kuna turns a page and tells Vedrana the story of a woman in their line: a queen who kept the first flame by a spring, a mother who tied her daughter to her against the wild sea wind, a singer whose trembling voice filled a whole golden valley. With each grandmother comes a single word - until Vedrana's own little notebook holds seven words of her own.

And slowly, evening by evening, Vedrana begins to understand what the trembling in her voice has always been. Not a flaw. An inheritance.

The Light Keepers is a luminous bilingual story for children and the grandparents who love them - a book about finding your own voice, standing tall in who you are, and discovering that where you come from has been inside you all along. Rooted in the real women of one Croatian family, from the green valley of Sinj, Dalmatia, to the white stones of Hercegovina to the lamplit streets of Zagreb, it carries the kind of light no wind can blow out.

For every child who has ever felt different. For every grandmother with a story to pass on. For everyone who needs to remember:

Svjetlo je tu. The light is here.