We want to protect our children. We want to keep them safe, away from danger. Some books for children trump up foreign problems to hold interest, gin up sample conflicts, whose terms can’t enter the child’s life, kept out categorically by boundaries of place or time or species. But there is one danger of danger-less books: we may begin to believe that danger is, by definition, outside of our own world. What makes holding a child’s interest IN that child’s best interest? What puts power in their hands, grit in the young-and-as-yet-pearl-less oyster? Epilepsy is a disorder that is all unseen — until it’s all that can be seen. Sufferers can't escape, witnesses can’t look away. When boundaries mislead, people are right to be afraid: then, engaging danger can alleviate the social anxiety that, otherwise, divides us from the neighbors whom we need. My Red Balloon offers parents and children tools with which to discuss andunderstand how a person’s pain — disease, dread, anger, difference, loss of agency — while real, does not have to end their world, or stop the conversation. With the confidence that tools & kindness bring, it might begin one.Take your child into the safety of your arms, and let them own, with you, a power that’s up to the crafty task of healing. Audrey Freudenberg's other children's stories are "Tuttle & Spree" and "The Prince Who Paused."  Her poetry has been published in The Boston Review, Slope, If and Only If, Milk, and Thistle.  Her plays & screenplays include The Snowman, Placebo, Ricochet, Right to Left, and Which; her novels, Anemone, and Eternity Leave.  Audrey got her degrees in theatre studies and poetry from Yale College and the University of Montana at Missoula, respectively.   Were it not for the neurological and autoimmune diseases that run in her family, the little identity poem that begins this book might never have grown into a message and a mandate.  She is grateful for that, and for Jessica Swider's magic hands and capacity to make emotion solid with a stroke of ink and genius. Jessica Swider divides her time between New Orleans and Alaska, doing ink and fabric arts.  Her bare bear-women have been exhibited at the Anchorage Museum.  Her poster work can be seen in & around New Orleans.  Working long hours in her family's henna tattoo stand, a reliable fixture of Alaska's summer fair and carnival circuit for over twenty years, Jess has honed her eye for detail in "the hot fire of wild commerce: it has to be fast, it has to be good, and -- because henna tattoo ink stains the moment it touches the skin -- it has to be right the first time." Jess was sitting at Victrola coffee shop, about a thousand miles south of her native Alaska, minding her own business (and plying a pen on a compelling page of her own graphic novel) when Audrey danced in from her class across the street and couldn't leave until she'd asked this stranger to illustrate a book to help her daughter face disease.  Jessica was leaving Seattle the next day.  After a year of emails and phone calls, having patiently tried & complied with the most abstract of storyboard elements, Jess had inked and watercolored her way into vouchsafing something reliable from a world that Audrey had been afraid would never feel reportable.