Jil Marie Ross believes strongly in the power of reading.

“I think that reading in general gets your imagination going,” Ross said. “It allows you to visualize things that you wouldn’t and helps you visit places in your mind.”

As a mother of two teenagers, she remembers being concerned when her children first started to read. They enjoyed reading books like Amelia Bedelia0 and Captain Underpants, but whenever Ross looked for books with African-Americans on the cover for her children, she found few options.

The only books featuring African-Americans seemed to be historical fiction books about slavery or the Civil War. Ross wanted something more current to which her children and other minorities would be able to relate.

“Reading scores for African-Americans and Hispanics are very low — I wanted to make books that would appeal specifically to them,” she said.

That’s how Ross became the author of the Shenanigans series — a group of books based on crazy stories from her own family.

So far there are five books in the series: Marie Plays Homeless, Foster the Mummy, What’s the Matter, Mr. Tinklebritches?, The Real Nitty Gritty and The Blake Family Vacation.

Each book tells a moral story, something that Ross attributes to her Catholic upbringing. Growing up in Chicago, she attended Catholic school her whole life, and the Church was something she “never got away from.”

Today, Ross is passing on the Faith to her children. Both her children attend Catholic high school. “They’re good thinkers who make good conscious decisions,” she said. Ross attends and serves as a lector at St. Walter Singular Church in Chicago, but she often visits her parents, who have attended Holy Family Church in Woodbridge for 17 years.

She decided to write her own book series featuring children making poor decisions and learning from their mistakes in an interesting and funny way. So far, she has dealt with serious issues like homelessness, fire safety and bullying without being preachy or harsh.

“My stories work as a catalyst to make you think, ‘who could be hurt and who could be helped as a result of this?’” she said. “They build imagination, critical thinking and forward thinking.”

Ross decided to include spelling guides in the books after her son told her children might have a hard time understanding her “big words.”

“I’m not going to compromise my writing,” she said. “I’m not going to dumb it down for them.”

To give her books some additional educational value, she included discussion questions to help students think critically.

“The story lines are such that you can have conversations about them,” Ross said. “The characters make bad mistakes and then they’re turned around so they can be a lesson. It starts a dialogue that you can have with kids.”

In the future, Ross said she would like to write books for different holidays — Christmas, Easter and Halloween — and she’s also interested in writing about the environment.

She hopes her books will soon be available in audio format, which would give parents an alternative to music for their children during car rides. “Secular music is so distasteful,” Ross said. “I’m sure there are other people like us who aren’t happy with the music selection — conscience-minded parents who want better for their children.”

Ross also would like to see her books made into movies one day.

No matter what happens with her books, Ross thinks parents need to be more invested in their children and more mindful of the types of messages they are exposed to. She hopes her books will lead to discussions of the important issues parents and children might normally avoid talking about.

“I just think that people need to talk to know how to converse and how to be critical thinkers,” Ross said. “You can’t get that from listening to negative or empty lyrics from songs.”

Get the book

Jil Ross’ Shenanigans books can be purchased at amazon.com, borders.com, target.com, barnesandnoble.com and shenaniganseries.com.