Linda Soules Releases Children's Career Guide 'So You Want To Be An Interior Designer' for Ages 10 to 14

Author Linda Soules has released So You Want To Be An Interior Designer, a 44-page illustrated children's nonfiction career guide for readers ages 10 to 14. The book is listed at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1972766309 under ISBN 978-1-972766-30-9. Its full subtitle is A Kids' Guide to Room Design, Color and Light, and the Creative Problem-Solvers Who Make Every Space Feel Just Right. It follows one designer through a working day and shows young readers what the profession involves, including the parts that television makeover shows tend to skip. The title has already won two 2026 honors: the Grand Prize at the Purple Dragonfly Book Awards and the Silver Award in Children's Nonfiction at the CIPA EVVY Book Awards. It is the latest entry in Soules's So You Want To Be A... series.

Career books for middle-grade readers often concentrate on the jobs kids already know: doctor, teacher, firefighter, athlete. Interior design rarely gets serious treatment, even though children spend most of their days in rooms someone planned, including classrooms, libraries, hospital waiting areas, restaurants and homes. Soules's book starts from that observation. Its premise is that every room gives instructions. A library signals visitors to lower their voices. A fast-food restaurant, with bright lights and hard seats, signals them to eat and move along. Interior designers, the book explains, are the people who write those instructions. That framing treats design as problem-solving rather than a matter of taste, and it reaches a reader who may never have thought of design as a career. The book is aimed at kids who draw, love color, are curious about architecture, or rearrange their bedrooms to see whether the new layout works better.

The narrative centers on a designer's real working day. Readers catch a tile mistake before the grout dries, run their hands over forty kinds of stone, and measure the doorways of a home for a grandmother who uses a wheelchair and wants to make her own tea. Along the way the book explains how interior designers differ from decorators, how floor plans are drawn to scale, how lighting changes a room's mood, and why building codes exist. It also covers the less glamorous side of the work: project delays, tight budgets, demanding clients, licensing exams and the problem of furniture waste. The scene with the wheelchair-accessible kitchen anchors a larger idea, that a well-designed space can tell everyone who walks in that someone thought about them before they arrived.

The book also works as a short history of the field. Young readers meet six figures from design history. Elsie de Wolfe brought light into gloomy Victorian homes. Paul R. Williams taught himself to draw upside down. Ronald Mace coined the term "universal design." Between the profiles, the book offers facts meant to hold the attention of a ten-year-old: bubble wrap began as a failed wallpaper, a famous "calming" pink never calmed anyone, builders once hid shoes inside walls for luck, and a hotel in Sweden is carved from river ice every winter. Research-based sections explain how ceiling height changes the way people think, why open offices made coworkers talk less, and why walking through a doorway can make a person forget what they came for.

Hands-on activities turn the reading into practice. Readers are invited to redesign their own bedroom on graph paper, measure their kitchen's work triangle, and hunt for desire paths at home. Design challenges ask them to plan for a giraffe, a fire-sneezing dragon, and a family of five sharing one bathroom. Each exercise uses a concept introduced earlier in the book, such as scale, circulation, accessibility or lighting. The back matter includes a kid-friendly glossary, recommended books, websites and places to visit, and an author's note. The structure lets a reader move from one chapter to the next, or read a section aloud in a classroom, and then take the idea into a real room.

The book's main distinction is its tone. Soules's stated philosophy for the series is never to talk down to kids, and this volume applies it by presenting licensing exams, budget limits and client conflict as part of the job rather than hiding them. Many children's career books describe a profession through its most appealing moments. This one includes the mistakes, the compromises and the paperwork alongside the creative work. It also ties design to inclusion by showing accessibility as a core responsibility, not an add-on. The mix of history, behavioral research, trivia and hands-on tasks gives teachers and parents several ways to use it, from a single-sitting read to a multi-week STEAM unit.

"Kids can tell when a book talks down to them. Interior design is about people, so the book starts with who a room is for and works outward from there," said Linda Soules, author of the So You Want To Be A... series.

The book is designed for several audiences. Classroom teachers and school librarians can use it for career days and STEAM lessons, where the graph-paper bedroom redesign and the kitchen work-triangle measurement need only pencils and a tape measure. Homeschool families can fold it into units on art, math, history or architecture, since the scale drawing, the design biographies and the behavioral research each connect to a different subject. Parents looking for a gift will find it suited to children who draw, love color, or rearrange their rooms at midnight. Because the book includes universal design and a client who uses a wheelchair, it also gives young readers a concrete introduction to accessibility as a design principle.

So You Want To Be An Interior Designer is available through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1972766309. The 44-page book is categorized as children's nonfiction and is written for ages 10 to 14, though the series describes its audience as extending to readers "and beyond." The ISBN is 978-1-972766-30-9. Readers, educators and librarians can find format and current pricing details on the listing page. Because the book carries two 2026 awards, the listing may be of interest to school and library buyers who rely on award recognition when choosing titles for classroom collections and career-day displays. Educators who want to see how the book fits alongside other titles can browse the full series from the same page.

The release extends a series that Soules envisions at more than 180 titles in total, with over 60 published to date and new volumes arriving on a steady cadence. Earlier and current subjects range from astronauts and marine biologists to magicians, stunt performers and roller coaster designers. The strategy is breadth: a young reader who finishes one book can find another profession with a different set of skills, challenges and routes in. Each title is written to pull back the curtain on a real career, covering its rewards, its difficulties and the path to get there. Interior design adds a field where art, mathematics, psychology, safety regulation and social responsibility meet, a combination that suits the series' aim of showing children a wider world.

The series' recognition continues with this volume's two 2026 awards. The Purple Dragonfly Grand Prize and the CIPA EVVY Silver Award in Children's Nonfiction give the book standing with librarians, educators and parents who use independent award programs to find titles. Soules has said the goal of the series is for readers to feel that the world is wider, more interesting and more reachable than they imagined. For interior design, that means showing children that the rooms around them were planned by people, and that they could one day be among those people.

About Linda Soules and the So You Want To Be A... series. Linda Soules is the author and creator of the So You Want To Be A... series, a growing collection of career-exploration books for readers ages 10 to 14 and beyond. The series is envisioned to span more than 180 titles, with over 60 published to date, covering careers from astronauts and marine biologists to magicians, stunt performers and roller coaster designers. Her guiding principle is to never talk down to young readers, who she believes are smarter, more curious and more capable than publishing often assumes. Before turning to children's publishing, Soules spent 25 years in law and finance, advising hedge funds and sophisticated financial institutions on legal and regulatory matters. So You Want To Be An Interior Designer is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1972766309.