BookHook Learning Adventures are children's stories written by a primary teacher who spent seven years watching which books children reached for twice — and which stayed shut. Every adventure is built to do three things: engage, educate, empower.
The three promises every BookHook adventure makes — in that order, because none of them works without the one before it.
No child ever fell in love with reading because an adult said it was important. BookHook stories open with something worth turning the page for — a recurring cast children get to know book by book, adventures that feel like theirs, and details worth going back to spot. The story earns the attention; nothing else works until it does.
Once a child is inside the story, the story can carry real learning — vocabulary worth keeping, ideas from the curriculum woven into the adventure rather than bolted on after it. It's the same principle behind everything MindMaps builds: children learn hardest when they don't feel taught.
Every adventure ends with the characters having figured something out — and the reader realising they could too. BookHook stories hand children something to try, say, or make after the last page, so the book doesn't end when it closes. That's the difference between a story a child was read, and a story a child keeps.
The gap between a reluctant reader and a keen one is rarely ability — it's whether anyone ever handed them the right book at the right moment. BookHook exists to be that book.
BookHook started in a classroom, not a publishing meeting.
After seven years teaching in London primaries, Arjun kept meeting the same child in different bodies: bright, curious, and convinced that books weren't for them. The stories that finally landed with those children weren't the worthiest ones — they were the ones with a hook. BookHook Learning Adventures grew out of the stories he told and refined with real classes, for real children, until the hooks held.
MindMaps builds tools that work with how children's minds actually work — games that train attention, tools that understand children's writing, and now stories that turn reading from a task into a pull. Each one maps a different part of the same territory. BookHook is the storytelling corner of that map.
Paperback and Kindle editions are on their way. Join the launch list and you'll be first to know the moment they're live — no spam, just the launch.
What if your child could make their own book? BookHook is also building a way for children to write their own story, add their own pictures, and get back a real book of their very own.
Make your own book →Written by a teacher who lived it. Arjun Davé — 7 years in London primaries, QTS, UCL PGCE. BookHook Learning Adventures are the stories he wishes had been on his classroom shelf: built in a classroom, not a boardroom.