The consciousness of global warming and the sense of it as part of the world seemed to me in the same way as for instance ballet does, to lend itself to a story.

There’s camp, there’s the horrible ballet you have to be in, there’s global warming. This is just one of the facts of children’s lives. To my mind it is pretty much like every Ivy and Bean story. It’s just part of the world.Īnnie Barrows: Yes. Slowed down and connected more closely to nature.Įric Simons: I’m not sure I’ve read a book quite like this where global warming is just a … plot point. Maybe we’d all be better off if the grownups Warming from a kids’ perspective, and how she arrived at the conclusion that Talks about how she wrote the book, how she thought through the issue of global “And now you care about global warming?” Ivy asked.īean elbowed Ivy. But then I did what you said, Bean, and smelled the grass and listened to the trees. “Really? You weren’t worried about poison oak and bugs?” Ivy asked. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “Happy Ending”: The problem, the kids decide, is that the adults have forgotten that what they love about the world and what there is to save. When the science fair comes along they take all the grownups outside and make them turn off their phones and just rest under the night sky. (One girl, knowing people breathe out carbon dioxide, brings all her siblings in and orders them to hold their breath.) At the last minute Ivy and Bean have a brainwave. The other kids come up with some hilarious solutions. Ivy and Bean get really stumped for a long time. But here it departs from the script of the classics of children’s literature and turns into a kind of referendum on life in the Anthropocene: for the science fair the kids are going to tackle global warming. It’s another typical setup: the second-grade kids have a science fair. Then there’s book seven, Ivy + Bean: What’s the Big Idea, published in 2013. In the course of the 11-book series they navigate all the familiar stuff in the world of kids’ books - their kind-but-strict second-grade teacher, summer camp, Bean’s annoying big sister Nancy, weird old neighbors, that time they signed up for ballet class and hated it. The titular heroines, the creation of East Bay writer Annie Barrows, are your classic odd-friend-pairing: studious, imaginative, clever Ivy rambunctious, outgoing, impatient Bean. If you have elementary-school-age kids you’ve probably seen or read about the Ivy + Bean series of books. The cover of Ivy + Bean: What’s the Big Idea?

Author annie barrows