By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan –Take a team of writers in Brooklyn and give them a small yet important assignment: Write an illustrated children’s book about global warming and climate change and what kids can do to help. That’s exactly what an “all-in-the-family” writing team did, using the storytelling traditions they grew up with, and framing their story around climate change and young people.
The result is Josie and the Fourth Grade Bike Brigade, published by Green Writers Press in Vermont and winning raves from reviewers in Brooklyn to a book industry website in Britain.
Meet Kenny Bruno, his wife Beth Handman, assistant principal of the P.S. 321 elementary school, and their daughter Antonia Bruno, who also went to school at P.S. 321 as a child and is now college graduate currently working for a sustainability group in California
”The family that prays together stays together” goes an old saying, and in the case of the Bruno/Handman family it’s “the family that writes together puts out a book together.”
Kenny Bruno told me that their book project was an all-in-the-family thing and each played an important role in bringing the book to the light of day. The 250-page novel, for children ages 5 to ten, is out now and making waves nationwide.
I asked Beth Handman how the family’s Jewish background figured into the book-making process. “We’re a secular family, agnostic,, atheists, and the main character of our book, Josie, is not Jewish,” Handman told the San Diego Jewish World. “But like the so-called ”chosen people” of yore, Josie chooses action.”
The story is simple: A little girl named Josie Garcia is from Brooklyn and she dreams of helping to prevent climate change and other environmental threats. The book, which the publisher Dede Cummings refers to as children’s “cli-fi” — climate fiction — has an interesting back story.
Each member of the family had a specific role.
“My father Kenny wrote much of the plot and focused on the content surrounding climate change, while my mother Beth was in charge of the classroom teaching aspects of the story and making sure we had the level of reading skills for the kids we are trying to reach.” daughter Antonia said.
“My role was to develop the characters and make sure the tone remained kid-friendly.”
The result is a book the whole family is proud of, Bruno said, and it’s part of a planned series of similar books also starring Josie and her Brooklyn friends. For the next installment of the climate-themed story, the authors are asking readers to suggest a good adventure where once again, Josie can choose action over inaction.
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Bloom is a freelance correspondent who lives in Taiwan and is an inveterate web surfer, thereby finding stories all over the world. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
chi cli-fi needn’t be all gloom and doom. Josie inspires kids to organize and take charge. This makes a scary topic not as scary. kids can make change and be powerful.