A richly-illustrated children's book about a dog named Schmu who traded Earth for Planet Zarka.
She is curious, fearless and impossible to forget. She lives on Planet Zarka now. And she has a way of knowing things before anyone else does.
Planet Zarka sits far from Earth, under twin suns, on the shore of the Lavender Sea. Its creatures come in every shape, every color, every size imaginable. Nobody looks twice. That is just Zarka.
When Schmu arrives, the planet changes her. Her fur comes alive with color. And she belongs there completely.
This is not the alien world of science fiction. Planet Zarka is warm, strange, generous and full of life. It is a world that meets every creature exactly where they are and asks nothing in return except that you show up as yourself.
The Schmu on Planet Zarka series follows Schmu and her family through adventures that ask quiet questions about kindness, empathy and what it means to do the right thing when nobody is watching.
Every page in this book was designed the way a room is professionally designed. With intention. With obsessive attention to how the eye moves through a space and what it feels like to be inside it.
Tatiana Almieri-duToit spent over two decades designing interiors before she picked up her iPad and built a planet. The compositions are not accidental. The color palettes are not random.
Planet Zarka was designed to feel like somewhere you want to stay.
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Schmu Goes to Market is a book about empathy the way humans should experience it. Not as a lesson. As a feeling. Schmu goes perfectly still when something is wrong, before anyone else notices. And kindness in this book is not a reward or a rule. It is just something that happens, quietly, because it is right.
It is also a book about beauty. Zarka is a world full of creatures who look different from each other and no one in the story stops to make a point of it. That IS the point.