The Grimhilderness Series
Grimhilda! a fantasy for children and their parents (suitable 7-12)
The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret (suitable 8-13)
The Disenchanted Wizard (suitable 9-13)
All these books can be read as stand-alone titles, and the age ranges above are only suggestions (I read books written for children of all ages)
Nonfiction
At this date (30th Jan, 2019) these books are available only on Amazon, either as ebooks or paperbacks. The ebook versions will be available again on Smashwords, iTunes, Kobo, Google Playstore and a number of other sites in the near future.
About the author and his books
Mike Crowl has been writing for most of his life. He began to be published on a casual basis back in the 1990s with various magazines and newspapers, and soon was writing a weekly column for a local newspaper. This column survived for five years, until one day when he wrote something that apparently offended the new editor. At that point he received a letter (this was back in snail mail days) in which he was summarily dismissed from the job.
In 2012 he and a friend wrote the script for a family musical called Grimhilda!, and Mike composed the music. This was presented in the Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin, the city where Mike has mostly lived since 1948 (he was born in Melbourne, Australia). This production was successful in terms of audience enjoyment - if not quite so much in terms of financial rewards. Subsequently Mike decided to turn the musical's script into a book; this was published as an ebook under the title, Grimhilda! - a fantasy for children and their parents, in January 2014. A few months later he completed a non-fiction title, one that he'd considered writing for some time. This related to his not-so-happy experiences after undergoing a prostate biopsy. It's called Diary of a Prostate Wimp.
The sequel to Grimhilda!, is The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret. This was published on the 8th November, 2014, on Kindle
The follow-up book in the series (called Grimhilderness) was published in early 2017. It's called The Disenchanted Wizard and like the others is published as an ebook.
More about Mike Crowl
Mike first began learning the piano at the age of seven. By the time he was twenty, he had worked as rehearsal pianist for a number of local shows, in an amateur capacity. This was followed for a couple of years with professional work with the New Zealand Opera Company, as a repetiteur. He toured his home country of New Zealand from the top to the bottom and back again, firstly as the accompanist/music director of a very much cut-down version of La Boheme that was performed in a variety of small towns, and then as the accompanist for the New Zealand Opera Quartet, a group of four singers who performed at virtually every high school in the country.
He attended the London Opera Centre at the same time as the much more famous Kiri te Kanawa, and then stayed on in London for another five years. On returning home to New Zealand with his English-born wife, he settled into a long career as an amateur musician. Alongside his playing, he's composed a large number of songs and piano pieces, a number of which have been performed by various local artists.
He's been a Christian all his life, though the denomination he's been involved with has varied as time's gone on, from Catholic to Pentecostal to Baptist. With his wife he's attended the Dunedin City Baptist Church for nearly thirty years. He ran a Christian bookshop from 1989 to 2006, after being an assistant pastor of the Assembly of God Church for two years.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Mike has also been asked to play a number of roles in theatre productions, He was involved in theatre in his late teens, but more often on the musical side than the acting. He's been fascinated by the process of memorizing lines (he's memorized Scripture and poetry for much of his life) and finds that age is no barrier to remembering scripts, but it does take longer as you get older to get to grips with the lines.
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