The first page, free to read. Every book opens like this.
Part of Batch One — 28 books, from $59.
See the bundlesStrong Minds tells one true story about one real person, and it is always the same kind of story: the part where things went wrong. We do not skip the failure. Children deserve to know that the people they admire were beaten, doubted and stuck — and that what got them out was rarely talent and never luck.
Start here · Book Two
A true story about doing the hard thing and losing anyway
We teach chess, so we will start you with the chess one. Anand lost the game that was supposed to make him. What he did in the days after is the reason children still learn his name.
The rejection came first. Every single time.
The obstacle was not a person. It was much closer than that.
Everyone else had a head start. It did not decide anything.
The front door was shut, so they went around the side.
The whole world was watching on the worst possible day.
Every book is an illustrated PDF you download once and keep. Read them on a tablet, a laptop, or print them for the bookshelf.
$9.83 per book
$7.11 per book
$9.08 per book
What you are buying: Batch One is 28 books, listed above, delivered as digital PDFs. Batch Two is being written now and will be sold separately — everyone who buys Batch One gets a discount on it. Nothing here is a subscription and there is nothing to cancel.
Who writes these
“Every class we teach ends with a story about somebody real who struggled. Parents kept asking for them in writing. So we wrote them.”
Strong Minds comes out of The Rook's Chess Academy, where we have taught children aged 3 to 18 online for years. These are the stories our coaches actually read at the end of a lesson — the reason a child will sit through forty minutes and then retell the whole thing at dinner.
true stories, written for children who are still learning to read
Sourced from interviews, autobiographies, match records and reputable reporting. No invented conversations. Where we describe what somebody might have felt, we say so.
Three to eight. A younger child is read to — the illustration carries the story and the text is short enough to hold attention. From about six they will read it themselves. Each book takes ten to fifteen minutes aloud.
Yes, on every single book. Tap any cover and you will see the opening page in full — illustration and text, exactly as it appears in the book. No email needed to look. And Book Two is free in its entirety.
A digital PDF per book, downloaded straight after payment. Nothing ships. You keep the files, read them on any device, and print them as many times as you like for your own family.
They are honest, not frightening. A child reads about somebody being told no, or losing, or being laughed at — and then about what that person did next. The failure is never the end of the book. If anything, children find it a relief to learn that adults they admire were stuck too.
Not yet. We are recording read-aloud versions and they will be added to the books you already own, at no extra cost.
No. Only one book is about chess. The rest are cricket, gymnastics, film, music, science and business. The books stand entirely on their own.
The first page, free to read. Every book opens like this.
Part of Batch One — 28 books, from $59.
See the bundles