Woei! A book cover story (and a title story, and a train story)
I made a book. It has a cover! And a title! And both of those things are, in fact, a minor miracle, which I will get to in a moment.
Whoosh! The Wonder of the Wind comes out on May 6, 2026, and right this very minute you can pre-order your copy. It's a non-fiction book for children, in Dutch, for curious readers aged 8 and up, published by De Eenhoorn Uitgeverij.
It covers the full story of wind energy. The historic windmills and offshore farms and energy sharing and the astonishing humans working to make all of it happen. It's technical and social and human all at once. It is, I hope, something children will want to read more than once, which is really all you can ask for.
Oh! And it spins. Literally. More on that in a moment, too.
The title
Here is what I will tell you about finding a title for a book: it is, in my experience, approximately as easy as catching wind in a jar.
I tried. I really tried. I sketched things out and crossed them off and tried again and came up with a long list of words that weren't quite right, functional but flat, descriptive but not alive. I wanted something that felt like the subject itself. Wind! It moves! It makes a sound! And I, a person who has loved onomatopoeia since childhood with what I can only describe as an irrational and wholehearted devotion, could not crack it.
Then Elly (the wonderful, patient, genuinely brilliant editor Elly Simoens) gave me her three options. And one of them stopped me in my tracks.
Woei.
Here's the thing about onomatopoeia: the whole concept has fascinated me since I was small, this idea that some words are supposed to be the sound they describe. It's subjective and universal all at once. And then, when I started living abroad, in France, the Netherlands, and finally in Belgium, I discovered something that honestly still delights me to my core: those sounds are different in every language. The same rooster, standing in the same field, crowing the same crow, makes a completely different sound depending on where you are in the world. Polish. Dutch. French. Different, every time. Which is objectively a little bit crazy! Animals do not speak local languages! And yet we hear them differently, we render them differently, we pass those sounds down to our children as if they are a fact.
I became a mother, and then I understood it in double. Baby books ask you to do a duck sound, a cow sound, a little train sound. And you realize, maybe for the first time, that your version is the version you were taught, and your neighbor learned something else entirely. Woei is the Dutch word for the sound of wind. And it is also, somehow, completely and perfectly correct. It contains a little puff of air. It whooshes.
The only problem was that Dutch is not my mother tongue. I understood immediately what Elly meant, what it sounded like, what it was. But spelling it? I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the internet before accepting that this was not a situation where the internet was going to help me. I went back to Elly. She spelled it out. And just like that, we had our title.
Woei! Het wonder van de wind. Or, if you prefer: Whoosh! The Wonder of the Wind. Both are correct. Both, I think, make you want to take a big breath.
The cover
I knew the cover mattered. I knew it the way you know a lot of things when you're making something. A cover is the first conversation a book has with a reader. It has to do a lot. And I could not make it work.
I tried and tried and nothing I came up with felt like the book I'd actually written. Not quite right. Not alive enough. I had the content, I had the title, I had this whole spinning, turning, energetic book about wind, and the cover sat there flat and without any energy in it.
Then I got on a train to Ghent to meet Elly. (Side note: if you have never been to De Speelfontein in Ghent, please add it to your list immediately. It’s a coffee place and a shop and altogether one of the sweetest spots. Go.) Somewhere between stations, something clicked.
The book itself spins. You actually turn it in your hands as you read, like the blades of a windmill. What if the cover spun, too? What if all the illustrations circled around the title, pulling you in, making you want to turn it before you'd even opened it?
I sketched it out right there on the train. A rough thing, a quick thing, but it had the feeling I'd been looking for.
Cover sketch made in the train to Ghent.
I showed Elly. She liked it. And then she said (this is why editors are worth their weight in gold) what if the title itself spins too? What if you have to turn the cover just to read it?
The people who helped bring this book into the world are many and I am grateful for every single one of them. Elly Simoens, who made it real. Vincent Coomans, who made the introduction that started everything, without him, none of this exists. Andries De Brouwer, for expert eyes that kept every fact accurate without losing the wonder. Kristian Petrick of Airborne Wind Europe, for feedback on airborne wind energy and for actually carrying a promotional folder to WindEurope. Achille Hannoset and Ada Canaydin, whose enthusiasm gave me the confidence to keep going.
And my city, Kortrijk, from whose kitchen window I can see wind turbines in the distance. They appear in the illustrations. They remind me, every single day, that sustainable solutions can be genuinely beautiful things.
Whoosh! The Wonder of the Wind is available for pre-order now, coming to Belgium and the Netherlands on May 6, 2026. If you're in or around Kortrijk on May 9th, please come find me at Tiny Stories bookshop — I'll be signing copies, crafting paper wonders, and I would love to meet you.
Pre-orders help more than you know. They help booksellers, they help publishers, they help a book find its readers. If you've ever wanted to hand a child a book about how the energy transition works (the wind, the turbines, the people, the future) I hope this might be the one.
