Abilene Author: Penny Parker Klostermann

The wait is over for shoppers looking for the perfect gift for the little ones on their Christmas list.

Penny Parker Klostermann has come to the rescue with her latest book, Merry Christmas, Dear Mars, which is available at Texas Star Trading Company, 174 Cypress St., and online. It follows two other highly successful books for Penny, There Was an Old Dragon Who Swallowed a Knight, published in 2015, and A Cooked-Up Fairy Tale, which debuted in 2017. Both books were published by Random House Books for Young Readers. The latest book, published by Macmillan/Holt/Godwin, not only promises to be another bestseller for Penny, it also checked a box for her.

“Having a published Christmas book was definitely on my bucket list,” she said.

The story is a retelling of A Visit from Saint Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore. The idea came in 2011 — yes, 13 years ago–when a blogger that Penny follows issued a challenge to come up with a reimagining of the story.

“There are many retellings of this famous poem,” Penny said, “so the challenge was to make my story fresh by giving it a fun twist, thus the new setting — Mars.”

Penny’s next book will be a slight departure in that it is based on a real person and is for young readers ages 7 to 10. Penny learned about Nan Songer, who lived in California during World War II, from a website she follows. Songer raised spiders and harvested their silk for the crosshairs used in weapons of war. Penny was instantly hooked and sold the idea to Astra/Calkins Creek publishing. The book will be released May 6, 2025.

Penny confesses that sometimes she would rather clean her bathrooms than write a new manuscript, but the finished product makes it worth the effort.

“Even though I don’t love first drafts,” she said, “the revision process can be very satisfying… polishing a story until it shines, with hopes that readers will love it enough to share with others.”