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Kidsboro is a small town in the woods behind Whit’s End in Odyssey. It’s a nice little place. It has a church, a store, a police station, a bakery, a weekly newspaper, and a total of zero citizens over the age of 14. It’s a town run by kids. Ryan Cummings, the mayor, helps enforce the laws, create new job opportunities, and in general, keep the peace in a town where he seems to have lots of friends and only a few enemies.
Click here to listen an audio version of Kidsboro on the Official Podcast!
by Marshal Younger
The inspiration for Kidsboro came from an unusual source. I often bounce my creative ideas off a fellow writer and friend of mine named Robert Skead. (Odyssey listeners will know that name because it’s been mentioned on the show.) In the late 1990s, I gave Robert a screenplay I had written titled Staying Through the Closing Credits. There was a scene in the script where a bunch of kids made a movie together. Robert thought that the whole script was going to be about kids creating their own world. When the screenplay went another direction, he was disappointed. But I found the idea of kids running their own world intriguing enough that I created the book series.
I wrote four Kidsboro books, each illustrating moral lessons and teaching in subtle ways about economics, government, and politics. The first book of the series was published in March 2000. At the time, the novels didn’t have anything to do with Odyssey. Later, Focus on the Family asked me to take the books and “Odyssey-ize” them. I added Whit, Eugene, Rodney Rathbone, and some other Odyssey characters to the existing storylines and now they’re part of Adventures in Odyssey canon.
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Now Available! |
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Author Marshal Younger is producer for Adventures in Odyssey, for which he has written more than 100 episodes. He is the author of several children's novels and has served as writer/producer of innovative projects such as Treasure of the Incas CD-ROM game. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Stephanie, and their four children, Bryn, Paityn, Kristyn, and Cory.
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