Meet Lumi: The Story Behind Lumafable's Brave Little Cat

Every children's book brand has a mascot. Most of them are cute. Not all of them mean something.

Lumi was designed from the start to mean something.

Who Lumi Is

Lumi is a small lavender and cream cat. Teal cape. Brown leather belt and boots. A star-shaped wand that may or may not be magical — the books are deliberately a little ambiguous about this.

Lumi lives in Maplewood village and has a habit of showing up when someone needs help — not because Lumi is powerful or special or chosen for anything, but because Lumi pays attention and cares enough to act.

That's the whole character, really. Pay attention. Care. Act.

Why a Cat

Cats are not the obvious choice for a brave, helpful character. Dogs are the classic loyal helper. Bears are warmth. Cats in popular culture often carry a connotation of independence to the point of detachment.

That's exactly why we chose a cat.

Lumi's bravery isn't the big dramatic kind. It's the kind that comes from choosing to show up, choosing to care, choosing to stay alongside someone when the easier thing would be to move on. A cat who does that is making a more active choice than a dog who does it by nature. That active choice is the whole point.

Gender Neutral by Design

Lumi uses no gendered pronouns in the stories. This was a deliberate decision made early in development.

Children's literature still skews heavily male for active, adventuring main characters. We wanted Lumi to belong to every child who reads these books — not to have a gender that any child might feel excluded by. The teal cape and star wand are distinctly Lumi's, not distinctly masculine or feminine.

So far, children have decided Lumi is whatever makes sense to them. We think that's the right outcome.

The Wand

The star wand appears in Chapter 1 and becomes a through-line for the series. It does magical things sometimes. It loses its light in Bonus Chapter 2. It's recovered through the collective care of Lumi's friends.

The wand is not the source of Lumi's power. This is made clear, quietly, across the books. Lumi helps people before the wand. Lumi continues to help when the wand goes dark. The magic was never really in the wand.

Maplewood

Lumi lives in Maplewood village — cobblestone streets, red-roofed houses, yellow flowers, blue doors. A wooden bridge over a sparkling river. Rolling green hills beyond the fence line.

Maplewood is designed to feel safe without feeling sterile. There are real problems here — loneliness, fear, the sting of criticism. But the village holds its residents. No one is left entirely alone. That quality of community-as-container is built into every story.

What Lumi Represents

If we had to distill it to one sentence: Lumi is proof that you don't have to be the biggest or the loudest or the most talented to make things better for the people around you.

That's a message we want to give children early and often. The world has enough stories about exceptional heroes. We wanted a story about an ordinary character who chooses, repeatedly, to be kind and present.

Those characters are rarer. We think they're more useful.

[Start the Maplewood adventure with Lumi — read Chapter 1 free](/stories/lumi-and-the-magical-wand)