Houston Author Has The World’s First Coloring Novel

You can’t beat meeting a fantasy author at the Texas Renaissance Festival.

The Four Duckmen was one of the few shops open to the public during the festival’s annual media day. The store specializes in handmade staves, usually topped with shiny rocks or sometimes the skulls of animals. Near the back, I met April Henley, showing off her innovative combination of novel and coloring book.

Treasures in a Bottle was first published in 2023. Originally, Henley was interested in just having the book illustrated in full color by artist Brian Brinlee, but she fell in love with the pencil drawings he did of the various magical creatures in the novel. An idea was born.

“I asked him, ‘do you think we could make this a coloring book?”” she said in a Zoom interview from her home in The Woodlands. “And he got so excited. He’s like, ‘I don’t think anyone’s done that.’ I’m so glad we ran with it. It has had such a wonderful response from audiences.”

The novel follows Merlin of Arthurian legend fame. A century after the fall of Camelot, the wizard lives a solitary life of writing and study, seeing few visitors and dwelling on the loss of the king he helped raise. It’s only when a dragon named Drius appears to say the magical creatures of the world are disappearing that Merlin rouses to action.

Henley is probably the perfect person to tackle this form of Merlin. At 35, she’s a professional copywriter living in a townhome that resembles a treehouse. Her writing space (furnished with an old rolltop desk, naturally) looks out over a verdant garden powered by Houston’s aggressive sunshine and omnipresent humidity. Like her subject, she gets easily lost in stories and lore. 

“I think we are losing a sense of wonder and whimsy,” she said. “I worry that our youth, they get lost in movies, television, video games. They are not reading as much as they used to, which means they’re not exercising their imaginations, their sense of wonder, their creativity. And I think that would be a horrible thing to lose. Getting back to nature, being away from the city, that just is a more healing thing than getting lost in how busy our lives are.”

Like a lot of people in Southeast Texas, Henley first attended the Texas Renaissance Festival as a teenager and fell in love with it. After attending college at Baylor, she returned to the city and attending the festival. A friend who owned a shop offered her free passes in exchange for walking in the daily parade to advertise the storefront, and from then on Henley was officially a Rennie. The fire juggler team Solar Rain brought her on as a videographer, as well as introducing her to the staff at the Four Duckmen. They guided her through the legal processes of setting up a writing business, finally leading to her selling her book in their shop.

And sold it did. Since first printing, Henley says she’s sold around 600 copies, including her entire run the first year she offered them at the festival. The rest came from attention on social media once she spent a year researching whether anyone had ever put out a coloring novel before.

“As soon as I threw that out there on the internet, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, people came back and they’re like, this is original,” she said. “We’ve never seen this. We love it. So that’s a pretty awesome feeling, to have still created something new.”

In Treasures in a Bottle, Merlin and Drius gather up representatives of as many magical creatures as they can. Brinlee shows these in loving detail, from the intricate scales of dragons to the homely grins of giants. All agree that mankind is beginning to forget them. While this is preferable to being hunted and killed as they were for generations, it leads to a widespread loss of magic in the world. Merlin, as the bridge between humanity and wonder, sets out to preserve the magical world.

Henley draws on obvious inspirations such as T.H. White’s Once and Future King. There’s more than a little Council of Elrond in the meeting that takes place across the first third of the book, and the plot resembles the classic Rankin Bass cult film Flight of Dragons. Nonetheless, Henley infuses her novel with a great deal of care for the world of magic, both its virtues and its flaws. Her story may take a rosy view of magic overall, but it doesn’t shy away from the violence and exploitation that has been a part of it. In a way, her world feels like an apocalypse in progress.

“Everything Merlin aspired to do rose and fell,” she said. “How does he spend the rest of his days? How does he carry the weight of what happened?”

There’s a melancholy about Treasures in a Bottle, but it’s still a story about preserving magic. The fact that it is presented as a coloring book helps bridge the gap between adulthood and childhood. In spite of the rise of adult coloring books, the simple act of coloring still feels beneath many adults. Henley’s pioneering work bridges the need of people who want to be a part of fantasy in a way modern technology often denies us.

“I love video games,” he said, “but you can’t beat a book.”