A friend built his kids a storybook generator in NotebookLM, a lovely idea. I tried it and hit two walls fast. The characters' faces changed page to page, and I had no real control over the story. So I built my own.
The fix for the drift problem turned out to fix the control problem too.
One approved cartoon portrait per character, locked in for every page
Story planned and approved before any art gets made
Quality pass checks structure and how it sounds read aloud
Remembers every past story, so plots and morals don't repeat
One locked face per character, and a memory that won't repeat itself
The hard problem in AI illustration is consistency: faces drift the moment you re-describe someone in words.
So each character gets one approved cartoon portrait, made once, locked in as the reference for every page. It also remembers every book written, so a new story never repeats last month's setting, value, or plot twist.
My kids get a new story that's actually about them, that teaches them something worthwhile.
This one's personal, built around my own kids, so there's no public demo beyond the sample page shown here.