Why this exists
My mum is 4,000 km away. I wanted my son to know her anyway.
Nadya Tsech
With my son, in Prague
I live in Prague. My mum is 4,000 km away — we see her twice a year.
Twice a year is not a relationship. In between there is the phone, and my son isn’t a phone talker: he’s always busy, a call lasts a few minutes, and then he’s gone and my mum is left holding a screen. That’s the part nobody warns you about when you move abroad. Not that you’ll miss them — that your child will grow up barely knowing them.
So I made him a book about going to see her. Not a book about a boy — a book about him, with his grandmother drawn in beside him, meeting him at the airport the way she actually does.
He asks for a new one most evenings. Him and his grandad on a skateboard, a scooter, a bike. Always the photorealistic style.
That’s the whole idea. A phone call is a few minutes and then it’s over. A book gets read a hundred times, and every time, they’re in it together.
— Nadya Tsech
A page from the book I made him
This is the flight out to her. It’s a real page of a real book — one of the demo books on this site, drawn from our own photos, which you can download and read from cover to cover.
Because a long, long journey lay ahead — four thousand kilometres! — to the faraway city where Grandma Nadya lived.
“Oliver’s Holidays at Grandma’s”
Read the whole bookHow a book gets made
You answer a few questions about the child — their name, their age, who matters to them, what they’re into right now — and add a photo of them, plus one of anyone who should be in the story.
We write a story built around those answers and illustrate it in the art style you pick. You see the cover and the first chapter free, before you pay anything, and if a picture misses you tell us what’s wrong and we draw it again.
The full book is 26 pages. The PDF arrives 10–15 minutes after you order, and you can put it on a shelf as a printed hardcover if you want the version that gets worn out.
What we won’t do
We won’t invent reviews
There are no testimonials on this site, because we don’t have any yet. When real ones arrive, they’ll be real. Invented praise is easy to write and, for the people we build for, easy to spot.
We won’t do anything else with your photos
They illustrate your book. They are never sold, never shared, and never used to train AI. We keep them so you can redraw a picture or reorder a print, and we delete them whenever you ask.
We won’t make you subscribe
You buy a book. That’s the whole transaction. Nothing renews and nothing expires.
We won’t ask you to pay on faith
The preview is free, with no card and no account, because the only honest way to sell something this personal is to show you yours first.
We’re new, and we’d rather say so
Booku hasn’t been around long. That’s exactly why the preview is free and why the guarantee is what it is — you shouldn’t have to take our word for any of it. Look at the real art and the real story, with your own family in them, and then decide.
See what your family looks like in a story.
See Your Story — FreeTakes about five minutes · No sign-up · No card
Booku is made by Mind Technologies s.r.o., Prague, Czech Republic.