Welcome to BookZone's stop on the tour for KidVenture: Through the Maize (Book 3) by Steve Searfoss hosted by Celebrate Lit.

About the Book

Book: KidVenture: Through The Maize (KidVenture Book 3)

Author: Steve Searfoss

Genre: Middle-Grade Fiction

Release Date: March 30, 2023

Chance, Addie and Sophie launch a new venture when they get lost in the country and stumble on the idea of starting a corn maze business. They quickly discover that while it’s easy to rush into a maze, finding your way out is hard. They will need to convince an investor to fund the venture, persuade a reluctant farmer to let them build their maze on his cornfield and figure out a way to work with his headstrong nephew. Along the way, they will realize just how little they know about planting corn, designing mazes, and writing business plans. Through many twists and turns —and dead ends— they will learn how to keep a partnership together and what the true job of a leader is. There’s only one thing harder than finding your way out of a maze: creating a maze people want to get lost in.

KidVenture stories are business adventures where kids figure out how to market their company, understand risk, and negotiate. Each chapter ends with a challenge, including business decisions, ethical dilemmas and interpersonal conflict for young readers to wrestle with. As the story progresses, the characters track revenue, costs, profit margin, and other key metrics which are explained in simple, fun ways that tie into the story.

My Thoughts

KidVenture stories are a blessing to parents of entrepreneurial-minded children. I read Kidventure: Twelve Weeks to Midnight Blue (Book 1) a couple of years ago and admired how Steve incorporated critical thinking, responsibility, sharing, math, and more into the story in a way that was not awkward and that 8-12 year-olds would understand.

He continues similarly with the siblings Chance, Addie, and Sophie in KidVenture: Through the Maize (Book 3). This time their eyes are set on creating a corn (maize) maze business. I liked the play on words with the title. As with the first book, while launching the company there are practical, business, and life lessons to be learned.

We find cooperation, self-regulation, work ethic, determination, and compromise included. When he couldn't figure things out, Chance asked his father for help. I love how his dad supports and advises without taking over and doing things for Chance and his siblings or not being pleased unless they do it his way. Allowing kids to learn at their own pace is such a hard thing to do as a parent, however, doing so helps them to grow and learn as they go.

It echoes how our heavenly Father teaches us. He has given us free will yet is always readily available to be invited to assist us or answer our requests for direction.

I really commend Steve for this series. It is one I wish I had available to me as a child. I was always thinking of things to create. Around the age of ten, I designed a game for a school project called multiples of seven for which I used snakes and ladders as an example, but instead of snakes, multiples of seven took you right back to the beginning.

It never went anywhere because my teacher did not believe I came up with it all by myself and refused to give me credit. I didn't have the support at home to further pursue it.

Thankfully, Chance, Addie, and Sophie have a support system that enables them to succeed. Parents can purchase this series to help their budding entrepreneur succeed.

What I Liked:

Questions at the end of each chapter
It is good for independent reading or with an adult
The inclusion of life lessons we all need to learn

What Gave Me Pause:

Not a thing

I recommend this book highly and rated it 5 out of 5 stars.

I received a complimentary copy of the book. My review is written voluntarily.

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

I wrote my first KidVenture book after years of making up stories to teach my kids about business and economics. Whenever they’d ask how something worked or why things were a certain way, I would say, “Let’s pretend you have a business that sells…” and off we’d go. What would start as a simple hypothetical to explain a concept would become an adventure spanning several days as my kids would come back with new questions which would spawn more plot twists. Rather than give them quick answers, I tried to create cliffhangers to get them to really think through an idea and make the experience as interactive as possible.

I try to bring that same spirit of fun, curiosity and challenge to each KidVenture book. That’s why every chapter ends with a dilemma and a set of questions. KidVenture books are fun for kids to read alone, and even more fun to read together and discuss. There are plenty of books where kids learn about being doctors and astronauts and firefighters. There are hardly any where they learn what it’s like to run small business. KidVenture is different. The companies the kids start are modest and simple, but the themes are serious and important.

I’m an entrepreneur who has started a half dozen or so businesses and have had my share of failures. My dad was an entrepreneur and as a kid, I used to love asking him about his business and learning the ins and outs of what to do and not do. Mistakes make the best stories — and the best lessons. I wanted to write a realistic business book, where you get to see the characters stumble and wander and reset, the way entrepreneurs do in real life. Unlike most books and movies where business is portrayed as easy, where all you need is one good idea and the desire to be successful, the characters in KidVenture find that every day brings new problems to solve.

More from Steve

KidVenture books are interactive business adventure stories for middle-grade readers. In every KidVenture book, a group of young entrepreneurs start a business and have to overcome a series of challenges to make their business profitable. Every chapter ends with a series of questions where readers face the same choices as the protagonists and can reflect on what they would do and how they would respond to the obstacle. These can be great starting points for rich discussions if read with a parent or as a group.

Beyond teaching business lessons, KidVenture books are also full of characters encountering ethical dilemmas and all sorts of temptations: the desire to lie when the business is not doing well, the enticement to break a partnership when it’s no longer convenient, the inducement to keep extra profits to yourself and not share them, and so on. Young readers are asked to wrestle with these questions too as the story progresses.

Years ago when my son was about 4 or 5 we went to a corn maze on a school field trip. After a while it occurred to me to hand him the map and have him lead us. I got to show him how to interpret the map, decide which way to turn, and how to look for landmarks. And —this was the best part— I let him get lost, and helped him figure out how to know when you’re lost and how to get find your way back to a spot you recognize. It was such a sweet memory, an almost perfect vision of what fatherhood is like. And then later I realized, as wonderful as that day was, being a father is much more challenging. The maze has a right way and a wrong way. Life is messier, way more complicated. That thought always stuck with me, the contrast between that day inside the maze and every day outside it. I didn’t know what to do with that idea, until I got a burst of inspiration and decided to write a new KidVenture book based on a corn maze business.

In Through The Maize, there are a group of three siblings who decide to start a corn maze business. Chance, Addie and Sophie remember going to a corn maze when they were younger and lament that it has not closed, so they are inspired to start one of their own. They go visit a farm just outside of town and present the farmer with a proposal to build a corn maze on one of his fields and fields. The farmer is skeptical and asks for an upfront payment to use his land. This threatens to sink the kids’ new venture before it ever gets going, but after some debate they decide to put together a business plan and find an investor. That’s when the action really starts.

After some negotiation, the farmer agrees to partner with the kids but they must work with his nephew, Cody who is older and has a lot of experience working on a farm. Right away Cody and Chance butt heads, as Cody seems to disagree with everything Chance proposes. Even worse, Cody demands his own share of the profits, separate from what was promised to the farmer. As the kids proceed with their plan, begin planting corn and drawing the maze map, the situation between Chance and Cody only gets worse. Finally tempers explode and the whole venture is in jeopardy. Not only is the business falling apart, there is an investor who will lose his money if Chance and Cody can’t figure out a way to work together.One of my goals with KidVenture books is for kids to feel empowered to take on the world and tackle complex problems. I don’t just mean business problems like figuring out what the price of a product or service should be, or how to market a company. That’s certainly part of it. But more broadly, I want kids to learn how to handle difficult people problems. Business comes down to working with people and to be good at business you have to be good at working with people, whether It’s motivating people on your side to work towards a common goal or negotiating with people on the other side to reach an agreement both can benefit from.

My hope is that young readers will see how Chance handles the relationship with Cody and learn from it. At first, Chance does a terrible job. He’s jealous of the attention Cody gets and he begins to interpret everything Cody says and does as an attack, as a challenge to his authority, even when it isn’t. Things finally start to change when he begins to understand what his role as a leader should be, and that includes making the people who work for him (like Cody) feel like heroes in their own story. That requires humility and letting other people take credit for what they’re accomplishing. Chance has to decide what’s more important: feeling properly recognized, or getting the job done and having a successful business?

Once Chance begins to reframe his relationship with Cody in this way, he also starts to become more aware of how he has been filtering all of Cody’s actions through his own sense of wounded pride and interpreting them in the worst possible way. Chance realizes he has the power to change how he construes what Cody says and does, and this gives him the freedom to focus on what’s important to him (namely finishing the maze) and not be constantly reacting to Cody. This is an enormously empowering realization, one that I hope young readers can learn from which will help them get through their own mazes in life.