Book Launch

Enchanted Astorwold is a collection of stories I wrote to keep young readers reading after they had finished JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series.  The stories I wrote assume that readers are growing more sophisticated but still able to suspend their disbelief in the power of magic.  But what is magic?  How can a magical world co-exist with a non-magical world?  What happened to the new generation of students who got coveted letters announcing they had been accepted into the world’s best known school of witchcraft and wizardry?  What is the Ministry of Magic up to now that the world knows all about the parallel realm of magic (with 600,000,000 copies of Harry Potter books sold in English alone)?

Astorwold is a farm in Suffolk about 60 miles north of London.  It is a secluded magical place, where a lot of the products are grown that are sold in Diagon Alley.  But Dame Agatha Astor has no magical heir until she discovers young, homeless Robin Astor Havorford, a reluctant student of Professor Virgil Verbal of Hogwarts, a neighbor of Dame Agatha’s.  Magic carpets, wands of solid wood with no inserted animal parts, and powerful venom from the deadly Ghanaian Green are but three of the things being developed by Astorwold’s gnomes, giant, and Moroccan illegal immigrants that might help save magical England and the whole of Europe from The Empire being built on the seabed of the
North Sea.

These stories began as resources for workshops for English teachers in Thailand to build supplementary classroom activities.  The first stories raised the question, how would a progressive teacher, with all the resources of Hogwarts, teach students to find enchantment in the wider world and in literature?  Once inspired, what will the graduates do that has never been done before?

My son, Andrew Dobson, converted the book text into a pair of e-books. Many of the illustrations are his work as well. You are invited to download the format you prefer to view [single page or side-by-side double page]:

http://www.fingerpaintdesign.com/enchanted_astorwold_by_kenneth_dobson_singlepageview.pdf 

http://www.fingerpaintdesign.com/enchanted_astorwold_by_kenneth_dobson.pdf