Husband-and-wife author team, A.J. Low, stopped by Carver Elementary School during their United States tour for the international “Sherlock Sam” book series.
Adan Jimenez and Felicia Low-Jimenez presented a special “Creating Your Own Heroes” workshop to third grade students on Wednesday, Oct. 26. The couple also signed copies of their two U.S. book releases, “Sherlock Sam and the Ghostly Moans in Fort Canning” and “Sherlock Sam and the Missing Heirloom in Katong.”
While the A.J. Low team has 11 “Sherlock Sam” books out in Singapore, only two have been released in the U.S. so far.
“We started writing about four years ago now in Singapore,” Jimenez said, explaining that the couple responded to an open call from the publisher for authors.
“(The publisher) had an idea for a chubby, Singaporean detective,” Low-Jimenez said. “Food is very important to Singaporeans and to Singaporean kids, as well. They are huge fans of eating.”
Most of the “Sherlock Sam” books are set in Singapore.
“They’re really cool because they incorporate Singapore culture,” Carver Elementary Librarian Joyce Leckband said, adding that there’s a glossary in the back explaining dialect-specific words that readers might not recognize.
Low-Jimenez said she and her husband have gotten used to writing together.
“Because there’s two of us, we kind of plan the book in a lot of detail before we can start writing,” she said. “We worked all of that out from the beginning.”
The author couple met at a friend’s dinner party in Singapore and had both been working in the publishing industry at the time. Jimenez was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley and spent nearly a decade in New York before moving to Singapore. Low-Jimenez was born and raised in Singapore. “Sherlock Sam and the Missing Heirloom in Katong” won the International Schools Libraries Network’s Red Dot Award in the Young Reader’s category for 2013-14. “Sherlock Sam and the Ghostly Moans in Fort Canning” received third place in the English Children’s Books category in the Popular Readers’ Choice Awards in 2013.
San Marino Toy & Book Shoppe and Carver Elementary have a partnership to bring authors to the school. The business donated copies of the “Sherlock Sam” series to the Carver Library.
