Thursday, October 1, 2026
CASHMERE — Andrew Rowe was not born a children’s author. But it may turn out that, despite everything else he’s been — and continues to be — that children’s author is what the plan for him was all along.
It was a winding path from less-than-affluent kid growing up 20 minutes from Compton to airborne medic during Desert Storm to tech guru to local author, but the book he’s just published, “Smart Parts: The Adventures of Mason and Morgan McPeterson,” will tell you one thing: He soaked it all up.
When asked about an author that really hit home for him as a kid, he offers up Shel Silverstein almost in advance, like he’s been looking for a chance to bring him up. That’s what a good author does to you in just one or two books. They leave an imprint of themselves, a recollection of not just their stories, but the way they tell them.
Rowe has a great target audience for trying out methods of reaching readers, and Silverstein’s singsong-style verse is a great way in. “That’s what this book is designed for — that age where everything is a question.” If kids are asking questions, then a book like this is a great framework for parents, he feels. “They can say ‘it’s about the brain, it’s about the nose, it’s about the toes,’ and then talk about those things.”
Using a rhyme scheme that will appeal to both kids and adults, in this book, Rowe has focused on anatomy as something for kids to learn about. And the adventures that the twin superheroes enjoy serve as the backdrop for this series of essentially poems that teach lessons.
An example from the beginning of the book starts the reader out with not just an introduction to the style of poem readers can expect, but which things the poem is going to teach about:
“Just think, and it will become so.
Your Brain controls the parts you know.
Your Arm is up, and then it’s down.
Your Face is smattered with a frown.
Think a moment, then start to grin.
Your Brain is changing pace again.”
It’s almost too clever for adults to get the same thing from it as a kid might. Children are natural learners, and with subjects they’re absolutely new to, they have no beliefs to color their education in advance.
“As a kid, I guess I was bored. I wanted some meat on the bone, you know, something that kind of challenged me a little bit,” Rowe says, explaining why he also leaves it up to parents to deal with questions on some of the words in the book — which are not necessarily words a 4- or 5-year-old might know.
That’s not to say there’s nothing for parents to have an inside chuckle about here. In a passage called “Construction Junction, What’s Your Function,” Rowe makes it fun for the big kid that’s still inside those from the “Schoolhouse Rock” era.
The art by Shaun Ivie, done in a style reminiscent of “Calvin and Hobbes,” paints a background of a job site, while Rowe incorporates some onomatopoeia — BOOM! CRASH! SNAP! POP! BANG! — that reminds parents of their favorite comic book heroes. Those noisy kinds of superheroes are who Rowe is trying to introduce to a new generation, but instead of throwing punches, they’re learning about their ears.
And it’s not clear if he’s trying to outdo himself, but another tie-in for mom or dad is the wrap-up on the ears lesson: Morgan and Mason sit and eat burgers and fries quietly while a great big slob of a man nearby makes disgusting noises while he chows down.
“Sir, you’re eating food, not slop.
My Ears are keen. They hear a lot.
So your smattering is less than flattering!
Please stop!”
If only parents had access to well-mannered superheroes as a teaching tool in prior generations, the sound of the food court in a mall might be a little more tolerable.
For some parents, teaching their kids about those parts of anatomy doesn’t belong in a silly book, and they may have a point. Reading a poem about things that make kids uncomfortable may negate the efficacy of the rest of the book. But he doesn’t leave much else out.
Brain, arms, face, hands, eyes, ears, noses, mouths, faces, tummies and even butts — he calls them bottoms — are all fair game, and the illustrations are just charming enough to be disarming when it comes to talking about bad smells… Like passing gas.
That’s right, in a Longfellow-worthy ode to farts right out of the shower, Rowe explains that we can still stink even if we have a freshly-scrubbed backside, and that it’s totally normal. This is a lesson lots of kids could stand to learn, although it feels like it should be accompanied by a warning not to break wind inside the shower itself.
One could be forgiven for noting Mason’s smug grin as his malodorous emission makes his sister’s hair stand on end.
Andrew Rowe isn’t in the habit of fooling himself into thinking this is a get rich (or famous) quick scheme, the business of writing children’s books. But this is definitely going to be a series. “It depends on if I do well with this book,” he says. “I have enough for another book right now. I really want to shift it, though, from biology and the human body to technology — that’s what I do on a daily basis.”
Rowe says that even though writing this book was fun and he intends to do more, he is still first and foremost the founder of Valley Tech Consulting, an IT firm he runs in Cashmere. This is where the big words come in: He does cloud migration, automation solutions and even agile delivery of software, a phrase that even the most prolific poets in the world couldn’t bend with the ease that it appears on his website.
It’s the next logical step, really. Learning about AI and technology in a children’s book written by a geek who’s been doing IT for 25 years using poems and cartoons sounds less like a ladder up to learning the hard stuff, and more like a waterslide careening down into it, arms waving in the air.
He’s not there yet, but it’s coming. But why didn’t he start there, instead of biology? “It was my wife. She’s just been awesome, she came up with the name, she gave me the framework, she said ‘I see you doing poems all the time, you should do one and call it Smart Parts.’”
Rowe decided on poems because it’s how he learned things as a kid, and he pauses to observe that he’s in a mathematical field in his “day job,” but he learned it musically, like a left-brained person and a right-brained person were lab partners in middle school.
“I didn’t grow up in a very affluent situation, and there weren’t a lot of choices. One of my close friends told me ‘if you go in, they’ll give you money, just tell them you won’t sign up unless you get to be airborne.’ In the end, I found it to be one of the most influential parts of my life. Because number one, as a medic, I wasn’t taking lives, I was saving them.”
His time in the Army had actually come to an end, and then he was called back to service in Iraq. It gave him life experience to jump off from that he hadn’t expected from joining the military.
Could he write a poem about the feel of the wind going past his face on a jump over the desert? “Oh, easily,” he says. “Being a veteran is a true gift. I almost don’t want to say this, but I don’t feel worthy of the status. I just did what I had to do. I was happy to do it and I’m happy to have it behind me and in my memory banks.”
More than anything, he says, he’s glad for the discipline he picked up jumping out of planes when it came time for laying out a children’s book.
“So easy, it’s the Wonder Twins,” Rowe says, referring to Zan and Jayna, the lavender-clad alien twin brother and sister from the Super Friends on Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s. Zan could take the shape of water in any form, and Jayna could turn into any animal in order to fight crime and save humanity.
That sounds like some kids he knows, using their brains to solve problems in a way that others might not be able to. And he doesn’t just mean Mason and Morgan McPeterson. He means his own kids, who, for the record, love this book.
Watch for “Smart Parts: The Adventures of Mason and Morgan McPeterson,” coming to a bookstore near you, even in Cashmere. Andrew Rowe might even just sneak it in there himself.
Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media
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