His twelve year old daughter asked him to write a book of his bedtime stories about growing up in the shadows of WWII. When he asked if she remembered them, she sat at the breakfast table and wrote down the subject lines of forty two stories.

He wrote The Pompey Hollow Book Club – an episodic novel from his bedtime stories.
“It reads like a Norman Rockwell painting,” says one. “Mark Twain meets the Greatest Generation,” says another.

Released on December 7 – in January, a Syracuse University student press named Antil… …WRITER OF THE YEAR.

In February, an executive from Barnes & Noble’s headquarters called him at home and said they wanted the book in their stores. By June – Books and Authors named it – BOOK OF THE YEAR – Family and Friendship. Jerome Mark Antil was invited to speak before the New York State Reading Association that year.

“The written word is two of the three R’s,” he said. We’re doing it backwards. We’re intimidating them with grammar and spelling – when storytelling is the answer to literacy. Storytelling can erase the literacy problem…
… and it takes a storyteller to tell history best.
My generation grew up reading the Sunday comics. There we were, with no supervision – lying on the floor for an hour or two every Sunday morning, reading the comics. We were reading.”

His second novel in the series – The Book of Charlie ~ Spirit of the Pompey Hollow Book Club is read around the world after being selected by Foreword Reviews as one of their favorite Young Adult fictions of 2014 – ranking it 5 Stars.
“It is BRILLIANT – we may have discovered this century’s Mark Twain.” Ron Masak stage star of “At Home with Mark Twain.”

OMG!…

“…but how’re you going to get their noses into a book – after they get their first IPhone?” asks Antil.

If you can get them to read just one book and they might become hooked on reading – for life…an important full life.

Well, what would the Pompey Hollow Book Club do? They’d meet the challenge head on, of course.  they’d think up an interactive book?

Book three in the series was born.

COMING in 2015!

“I enjoy writing books that read like scrap books.  I teach through the magic of storytelling – with historically accurate detail about what growing up was like in rural America in the shadows of WWII – the war that killed seventy million people.”  Jerome Mark Antil

Any school with Pompey Hollow Book Club books in their curriculum get no cost annual “Skype with Author”

(Email jahoomus@littleyorkbooks.com for school references and details)