Key Selling Points:
- A sympathetic exploration for young readers living with anxiety while proposing real-life strategies and coping mechanisms.
- Can be used as a resource for those parenting anxious children with a variety of demonstrated coping mechanisms throughout, including deep-breathing and exposure therapy. Ellis slowly builds confidence after facing perceived threats and learning through experience that not everything is as scary as it seems at first.
- Author Sal Sawler’s previous books have been shortlisted for the Forest of Reading and Hackmatack children’s choice book prizes and won a Moonbeam Children’s Book Award.
- The book features a non-binary child as the main character and does not make their pronouns a focus but rather incidental/just a fact of their identity.
- Lived Experience of the author: Author Sal Sawler shares Ellis’s anxiety and they/them pronouns.
- Fills the need for more literature on anxiety for parents, educators, and loved ones to help children living with anxiety in its many forms.
- A STEM Crossover: While Ellis On Guard is primarily a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) title, it also includes a STEM component, with Ellis building a trap in order to catch an imagined dognapper and protect their beloved dog, Peanut.
- Moments of humour break up the tension/anxiety of the story.
