West Hartford Resident Publishes First Children's Book

West Hartford resident Adam Culbert has published his debut children’s book, “Sometimes I Forget You’re A Robot.”

Writing under the pen name Sam Brown, the book was published on Oct. 17 by Dial Books, which is a division of Penguin.

Culbert, reached by telephone last week, said that he is excited about the book.

“It’s something that I wanted to do for years,” he said. “I’ve worked on picture books as an adult, and I wasn’t happy with how they were coming out. I just kept working [on the children’s book] for  while.”

The 32-page book , which is geared to 3 to 5 year olds, tells the tale of a little boy who wishes for a robot, gets one and finds out that “it’s not exactly what he imagined,” Culbert said. The robot, for example, does not fly or swim or talk. It just goes, “beep, beep, beep.”

“It’s about how he can be happy with what the robot is,” Culbert said. “The message is find happiness as it is, and not as you want it to be.”

It took Culbert a couple of years to write and illustrate the book. And writing for children, Culbert said, is an art unto itself.

“It seems simple, but it took a lot of time how to write it,” Culbert said. “When you are doing a children’s book, it’s only 32 pages. There’s so much stuff I wanted to put in or or would have helped out the story, but there wasn’t room for it.

“The big challenge was to simplify it and make it a good story.”

Culbert, who has lived in West Hartford for 7 years and is married with two children in the school system, said that he would be making local appearances to promote the book, which goes for about $11 in retail stores and on Amazon.com.

So far, the reception for the book has been excellent, Culbert said.

“Sometimes I Forget You’re A Robot,” was reviewed by children’s author David Michael Slater in the New York Journal of Books.

“There is wisdom here,” he wrote. “The message isn’t that growing up means adjusting your expectations and thus setting aside your dreams—it’s that having reasonable expectations will help you achieve them.”

He’s currently working on his second children’s book as well, though it’s unrelated to “Sometimes I Forget You’re a Robot.”