A new children's book series

Islands of Home a song of many islands, one home

Two grandmothers. Twelve regions. One feast, one song. A twenty-six-book children's series carrying pre-colonial Filipino culture forward, without the colonial weight that usually travels with it.

Be notified at launch Read the story
Books 1 and 2, September 2026 Pampanga and the First Grain. Cebu and the First Sour. The first two books of Arc One launch together, opening the series with April's father's region and her mother's region.
April Madlangbayan, author of Islands of Home

April Madlangbayan, writing home

The heart of the project

Two grandmothers.
Two sides of a family.
One table.

The series grows up with the reader. Parents share Arc One with their young children, and those same children grow into Arc Two as readers themselves. Arc One is the meal. Arc Two is the song. Together they are the inheritance: fed and sung.

Arc One — Apu's Table

For Apu

April's father's mother. Kapampangan. Known for her cooking. April's childhood anchor and connection to her culture. In the series, Apu is alive inside the story: the one who reads the girls their bedtime stories, the one who sends them traveling, the one who cooks the Philippines into one feast.

Thirteen early illustrated chapter books, ages six to eight, read-aloud from four. Each book ends with a recipe, a glossary, a family discussion.

The meal. Belonging through love held with the same weight as belonging through blood.

Arc Two — Lola's Song

For Lola

April's mother's mother. Visayan. Known for her singing. The grandmother April never met, because Lola died when April's mother was eighteen. In the world of the series, Lola is alive. The fictional frame does what life could not: it puts both grandmothers at the same table.

Thirteen lower middle grade books, ages eight to twelve. The series closes with an original lullaby in twelve regional dialects, recorded by April and her daughters.

The song. Heritage survives when it is carried, not held.

A song that celebrates the differences of many islands that make one home.
Opening the series — September 2026

The first two books
launch together.

Every book in the series stands alone. You can start with your family's region, the region you miss most, or the one your child has been asking about. The first two open with April's parents' regions — the symbolic heart of the launch.

Book One · Arc One

Pampanga and the First Grain

Apu's region. The foundation grain.

Maya and Tala drift to sleep as Apu reads them a story about Aring Sinukuan teaching the first Kapampangan people to grow rice on the slopes of Mount Arayat. The story is the map of the adventure. The girls wake in 1548, at the Pampanga River delta, and learn to clear, flood, plant, wait, and harvest alongside Mayumi, a young mamaluyan in training.

Region
Kapampangan, Central Luzon
Ingredient
Rice, in a bamboo tube
Method
Palayok, clay-pot cooking
Back matter
Recipe, glossary, family questions
Book Two · Arc One

Cebu and the First Sour

Lola's region. The first taste of the sea.

The girls travel to 1548 Cebu and meet Kalinaw, a baylan in training, on the reef at low tide. They learn the quiet kitchen of kinilaw: fish, batuan, ginger, salt. When they come home, the younger sister writes a letter to Lola about what they saw. Apu sits nearby, smiling, because she knows what this letter means.

Region
Cebuano, Visayas
Ingredient
Batuan, the sour fruit
Method
Kinilaw, curing without fire
Introduces
Lola, by letter
The shape of the series

Twenty-six books, built to grow with the reader.

Each book is an adventure a child can finish in one sitting or a parent can read across a week of bedtimes. Under the stories lives an architecture that reveals itself slowly, book by book.

The travel mechanic

Apu reads a region-specific pre-colonial Filipino story at bedtime. As the girls drift, the portal opens. They arrive in 1548 as modern-day girls. The magic does not ask whose blood is in the room. It asks who was listening.

The regional guides

In every region the girls are met by a young babaylan-in-training, rooted in her region's specific tradition, not a flattened pan-Filipino archetype. She becomes the friend the girls remember for the rest of their lives.

The feast and the song

Arc One ends with a feast served kamayan on banana leaves, hands reaching from the same leaf. Arc Two ends with an original lullaby sung in twelve dialects. Both are recorded. Both are the inheritance, given forward.

April Madlangbayan
About the author

April Madlangbayan

Filipino-American writer. Mother of two daughters the children's books are written for. She comes from a nursing background, a careful reader of bodies and stories, and a long devotion to pre-colonial Filipino research. Islands of Home is her invitation to a generation of children who inherited a partial story: a door back in, through wonder, through a grandmother's hands, through an ordinary bedtime.

The series began the way the best children's books do. She started telling a story to her own daughters, and the story would not stop.

Islands of Home is the children's series. April's adult work on pre-colonial Filipino memory and inherited trauma lives at inheritedwound.com. Two books, one inheritance, one voice.
Before launch

Be there when the first books arrive.

Leave your email and April will write to you once, when Books 1 and 2 are ready in September 2026. No regular newsletter, no noise. Just the launch.

Emails go straight to april@islandsofhome.com. Unsubscribe anytime, no questions asked.