Bolton Resident Angelica Ganea releases new children’s book “Love Is Light,” promoting compassion and courage

November 27, 2025 · 0 Comments

By Riley Murphy

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Angelica Ganea, Pop/Classical Singer-Songwriter and author, has just come out with her newest book, “Love Is Light,” where she reminds readers to love everyone.

Ganea grew up in Romania, where, since she was six-years-old, she had been acting, singing, and dancing on stage full-time.

She even attended university for musical theatre.

When she moved to Canada almost 30 years ago, Ganea says everything changed.

She says the mix of not knowing English and the ever-difficult musical industry made it nearly impossible for her to break through.

Since then, she has tirelessly taught herself English and now creates music and writes books.

The transition to writing was not unfamiliar to her, she says, as she grew up writing since she was eight years old and performing essays in her classes.

“She was like one of those angels in disguise,” says Ganea of her Grade 5 teacher who encouraged her to read her essays in class. “Now looking back, she gave me so much confidence.”

Ganea says today it’s now easier for her to write in English than in Romanian.

In 2003, Ganea was struggling to write songs, and she ended up turning some of the short stories she had written into lyrics.

“I turned it into lyrics, and then something totally unbelievable happened. It’s like the song was already in my head,” she says. “Everybody is different, but this is the way that it worked for me.”

Ganea compiled both the songs and the short stories that inspired them into a book she published in 2012.

She wrote her next book on habits in 2017, and has now released her newest children’s book.

“Love is Light,” Ganea says, adding the idea first began when this author was having visions and strange dreams, and she even a near-death experience in 2012.

“In 2017, I had one of these spiritual experiences that lasted about six weeks,” she continues. “For six weeks, I felt like I was just walking in pure love.”

She says all of these elements and experiences of her life formed the idea to love everyone, which is apparent in her newest book.

“It doesn’t matter who the person is, not to push against what we call the villain. In all movies, we see that the villains are always sought out and destroyed and killed,” says Ganea. “It doesn’t apply just to the rhetorical villain, it applies to anything, even to things that we don’t understand about ourselves. When we get angry, we get upset, we always push against this darkness, and the idea is to have compassion for it and understand it because it’s in us, every single one of us has both good and bad.”

Growing up, Ganea shares that she had a tremendous fear of evil, whether it was the threat of the “boogie man” or “bau-bau” if she did something wrong, or the elements of the world around her.

“I don’t remember a time as a child being at peace, believe it or not, I was always afraid,” she says.

For years into her adulthood, Ganea struggled with fear, until the idea came to her one day to face her fears with love

“I was in complete and utter peace and love. I felt nothing else, and I’m thinking this is my purpose. This is my purpose to write something about this.”

From here, Ganea put the idea into her children’s book Love is Light, illustrating and writing the story herself. She even wrote a song to accompany the book, also named “Love is Light.”

Ganea describes the book as the ancient struggle between darkness and light.

She says the book teaches children that by looking at something with love, they can change what they don’t like into something they do.

“It teaches kids to live without fear, to grow up without fear, because anything that we are afraid of is just there to teach us something.”

“The only way to learn about love is to experience its opposite, we would not know what light is if we don’t know darkness.”

Ganea also hopes the book will help against bullying, and that kids will look at one another with kindness and compassion.

In the author’s forward, designed for parents, Ganea describes the darkness and light of life through the right and left hemispheres of the human brain.

“The idea is to balance them both because we can’t live in this world with just one of them,” she says.

“Duality exists in us in that form of these two hemispheres of the brain. We can’t run from ego. We can’t run from what we call darkness because it’s there,” says Ganea. “We can learn to deal with it and use it respectfully.”

The villain in the story, bau-bau, represents the ego, and Ganea says, “we have to love it in order to understand it and balance it.”

After first self-publishing Love is Light in 2020, Ganea decided to re-write and re-illustrate the book, complete with beautiful metaphors and lessons.

Her accompanying song for the book will be released on December 19, which Ganea says she learned music production, orchestration, arrangements, and software for it.

“It was massive for me, but it’s a gift for me because I learned so much.”

She’ll also release the song in Romanian in January, along with the English and French versions of the book.

The book is available at select Chapters and Indigo stores, or on Ganea’s website at www.iamangelica.com.