Matthew David Brough has released the first installment of his fiction adventure series, Del Ryder and the Crystal Seed, officially launched in his hometown of Winnipeg in July.
“I remember my mom reading the Chronicles of Narnia out loud to me and my sisters and it having such an impact on me,” said Brough, pastor of Prairie Presbyterian and an avid blogger. “When I was a teenager, my mother read The Lord of the Rings for the first time as I was reading through it, just so we could discuss it.”
He hopes for this series to be a similar avenue for his own daughter and other families, a book that might strengthen personal values and stretch reading skills.
“When I set out to write Del Ryder and the Crystal Seed, it was few weeks before my daughter’s fifth birthday,” he said. “Thinking that the completion of a novel would be a mammoth task, I believed if I started then, I might have it completed by the time my daughter was 10. The story, to my surprise, was completed in just a few months, several months before she would start kindergarten.”
Del Ryder and the Crystal Seed centres on an 11-year-old girl looking for a sense of belonging who, with her three best friends, enters a portal to the mystical world of Azdia.
The residents of the newly discovered planet believe that Del Ryder and her friends are their only hope to bring light back to their world—a world that is slowly dying away with a great loss of hope. The book includes forgiveness, restoration, sacrifice, and community—elements in an ethic that Brough views as not overtly Christian.
“My hope is that parents and grandparents will read this and other books and talk about them with the children in their lives. Reading out loud and book discussion has such potential to influence children for the good.”
Brough’s book can be purchased online through Amazon or through the independent bookstore McNally Robinson in Winnipeg.
