Marissa Moss grew up telling stories and drawing pictures to go with them. She sent her first picture book to publishers when she was nine, but mysteriously enough, never heard back from them. She didn’t try again until she was a grown-up, and then it took five years of submitting stories, getting them rejected, revising them, and sending them out again until she got her first book published.

Now she has written and illustrated over fifty books, many of them from her best-known series, Amelia’s Notebook. When she wrote the first book fifteen years ago, the format of a handwritten notebook with art on every page was so novel, editors didn’t know what to make of it. Now the diary format is a common one.

Mira’s Diary: Lost in Paris (Jabberwocky, 2012) is another new kind of hybrid book: a mix of history, art, and time travel in the Amelia boundary-breaking vein.