Written by Emily and Dad

We wrote this book together — a father and a daughter — which felt like exactly the right way to tell a story about a family crossing hard country side by side.

That’s the first line of the authors’ note in the back of The Long Road West, and it’s the whole idea in one sentence. Behind the byline is a dad and his daughter Emily, trading chapters and arguments and ideas at the kitchen table — about what Emily Tanner would notice, what a ten-year-old would really say, and how honest a book for kids is allowed to be. (Their answer: very. The true shape of it, not the pretty version.)

For Dad, these books are a long game. Screens are easy and time is short, and he wanted something different with his kids: to make things with them, not just for them — stories a family builds shoulder to shoulder, the way the Tanners cross their two thousand miles. A book outlasts a childhood. It sits on a shelf, and gets handed to a grandchild, and keeps saying what the family believed long after the bedtime chapters are over: that the people you love are worth more than any treasure you could ever chase.

Emily Tanner shares a name with her co-author, and that’s no accident — there’s a good deal of the real Emily in the girl who watches everything closely and will not let anyone be forgotten. The rest of the family will recognize themselves in these pages too, in the places families always hide in the books they make together.

If you close this book believing that the people you love are worth more than any treasure you could ever chase — then you have understood the true shape of it, and both authors would be very glad.