New book tackles the grief that children carry

Angmering musician, writer and illustrator Eden Jones tackles the grief that some children carry in her new book.
Eden JonesEden Jones
Eden Jones

The Cloud Lasso is published by Pegasus and can be ordered at www.edenjonesbooks.com.

It’s all a happy change of direction, she explains: “I started gaining some momentum with my music with over 500,000 streams and then Covid hit and meant the industry stopped.

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“Since the first lockdown and in between making music, I have turned my hand to writing and illustrating children’s books and art.”

The Cloud Lasso is the latest.

“I was a nanny while I was trying to sing for 15 years, and I read every single children’s book that you can ever imagine. The only gap that I felt was in the market was books that rather than just being funny and silly and happy also carried a message that really matters.

“The children that I looked after were mainly very privileged, but one of the problems I saw was loneliness, that their parents weren’t around all the time… and I did my first book about that.

“But The Cloud Lasso is about the fact that children can hold sadness. You think of children as happy little beings, but they really can hold sadness and grief and trauma.

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“The book is about a little monster who has a cloud that follows him around and makes him sad.

“The other monsters ask him to play and he doesn’t want to because he doesn’t want to lose his cloud even though it makes him sad. And then some other monsters want him to play… I won’t give away the ending!”

As for the music, Eden is certainly returning to it, working on some music at the moment amid the writing and painting.

She records as After Eden: “I used to go by the name Eden Jones, but I changed my style as I got older. I thought After Eden sounded a bit better with the new style and the new sounds. I developed the sound into a more mature version of myself.

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“I think when you are younger you tend to go more with the flow.

“The producers will say ‘Let’s record this song in a certain way’ and you do it when they say ‘Let’s make the next song more Miley Cyrus.’ The industry is so full of strong male producers, and I think for a lot of females this male-dominated world can be a bit intimidating, so you just go with it.

“But now I have got older, I want to do my own thing. The sound is now quite ethereal and more emotive and lends itself to film. Before it was more pop which I loved in the days when I used to go to a lot of clubs with my friends, but now the sound is more mature.”

But then everything changed.

“My label was a Swedish label, and after Covid hit, they let me go and said ‘We can work together in the future, but at the moment we are cutting back a bit.’ That was quite a big hit emotionally. When you have been on a long journey and you are just starting to get to the point where I was reaching out to a lot of influential people… and I was hoping it was going to happen in a month and then it was two months and now it has been a year.

“At the time I felt very optimistic.

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“But I have had to redirect my creativity in other ways before I went completely insane. I was a painter for years before I was ever brave enough to share my artwork, but this is the year of the brave, and I have put my creative energy into it.

“During the pandemic I have done a lot of painting and a lot of writing.

“ I am a quarter of the way through a screenplay which is very exciting but also a lot of work especially for someone like me who thinks of every detail working out the characters.”

More details on www.edenjonesbooks.com.

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