When Darlene Werner was ten years old, she had a dream about a singing lion. She never forgot it. For decades, she told the story to her sons and later to their children, shaping it with a storyteller’s instinct and a grandmother’s warmth. By the time she sat down to write it as a book, the story had lived a full life inside her family. The Singing Lion, published in 2025, is the result of a book about the people she loved most.

The novel follows Chloe, a ten-year-old girl in Park Forest, Illinois, who wakes on the first day of summer vacation after a vivid, unsettling dream. Strange music draws her through her neighborhood. At the local park, beside the slide, she finds a large cage holding a lion with golden-brown eyes. She frees his trapped paw, discovers the cage door is broken, and spends the afternoon being chased through cornfields and over fences by an animal that has no intention of harming her. He only wants to sing.

The lion, named King, hums a wordless melody that Chloe alone can hear as language. His song points to animal thefts at the local zoo and clues that the children must unravel. Alongside her is a group of neighborhood kids, each matched to a spirit animal through a ritual involving animal crackers and the quiet authority of Nana, the twins’ grandmother, who understands far more than she lets on.

The spirit animal concept anchors the book emotionally. When Nana reveals that Chloe’s spirit animal is the lion, Chloe’s reaction is immediate skepticism. She is small, shy, and unsure of herself; the lion represents bravery, royalty, and strength. The mismatch feels impossible. But the book dismantles that doubt steadily. When Chloe frees King’s paw despite her fear, when she stands up to a bully mocking a classmate in gym class, when she turns back toward the lion instead of running, the story makes the same argument each time: you already are what you think you cannot be.

Mark Werner, Darlene’s husband of more than four decades, has been promoting the book since her death. He describes her intention plainly. “Her message was to believe in yourself, that you have the ability to overcome and do hard things,” he said in a recent interview. “You need to find that inner courage to face whatever it is you’re trying to overcome.” He then added what felt like the key to the whole book: “Be true to yourself. Be kind. Do the right thing. Have courage.”

Those values were not abstract for Werner. Every child in the book is named after one of the Werners’ six grandchildren. The protagonist shares her name with their first grandchild, born with Down syndrome, who, at two weeks old, suffered a heart attack that left her without sight, speech, or movement. In the book, Chloe’s older sister Grace lives down the hall, unable to walk or talk,  the quiet weight the protagonist carries through her adventures. The gym class scene, in which Chloe confronts a boy mocking a struggling classmate, was drawn from real life: Darlene standing up for one of her sisters. In the book, Chloe rises on her toes, looks the boy in the eye, and tells him it must be nice to be so perfect that you can laugh at anyone different. It is the kind of bravery that leaves no visible trace.

The character of Nana blends two women: Darlene’s own grandmother and the person Darlene had become as a grandmother herself. “When I see Nana, I see Darlene,” Mark said. The character opens doors before anyone knocks, chooses her words with care, and watches events as though she expected them, steady, warm, and quietly indispensable.

The book began as a classroom punishment. Darlene’s class had misbehaved for a substitute teacher. When their regular teacher returned, she assigned a short story on any topic, ungraded and non-returnable. Darlene wrote about her dream. Her teacher was so moved that she returned the paper with an A-plus. The story stayed with Darlene for the rest of her life, growing in the background until it was finally a book.

The Singing Lion ends with its mysteries open. The zookeeper’s motives remain unclear. King’s song has delivered its first message. The children have formed investigative teams, and Lily, just back from summer camp, is about to reveal something none of them knows. A second book was always part of the plan. Promoting this one has been, by Mark’s account, a form of grief work. He has pushed through it because she would have done the same. “It’s the last thing I could do for her.”

The Singing Lion does not ask its readers to work hard. What it asks is rarer: that they notice the small moments when a person decides to be brave, or kind, or honest, even when afraid, even when no one is watching. Darlene Werner spent a lifetime noticing those moments. She built a book around them, named every character after someone she loved, and left it in the hands of the world.

You can buy your copy from the given links:

Amazon: https://a.co/d/0jgayRJP

KOBO: https://tinywebs.site/BR3bpC

Google Book Store: https://tinywebs.site/S46aVX