Book Nook: Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma - The United States of Anthropocene

Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma: The United States of Anthropocene is a middle-grade novel for our unpredictable, troubled and overheated times, about a 13-year-old girl who, in 2030, has to save the world from global warming because adults screwed up, climate protests have fizzled and the world is on fire.

It's an adventure story, a horror story - unfortunately all too real, all rolled into one big, global mess.

What Mandalay Hawk calls civil disobedience, a judge calls a crime.

Mandalay and her pals create KRAAP - Kids Revolt Against Adult Power. They study their brains out and ditch social media. They lead a teen deluge to Washington unlike any other, and then there’s rapping in the Oval Office to a captive president. They’re not leaving until they get what they want.

You can learn more in this interview.

Why did you write this book?
In 2014 or so, I saw that my then two middle-grade daughters were reading mostly Dystopian-themed books, Harry Potter and the like. And I thought, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they had adventure stories to read that dealt with the real world, instead of fantasy? So I decided to write a real-life adventure story that dealt with the biggest problem in the world - global warming. It took me six years to research and write the book and my kids are older now, but I still wrote the book for that 8-12 year old age group because they are the ones who need to get involved.

How can fiction books help raise awareness of very real issues?
I am a firm believer that kids need to read as much as possible and one way to grab their attention is with adventure stories, stories about kids their own age tackling big problems, overcoming adversity, fighting the powers that be - parents, teachers, politicians - people that control their lives. Stories like these, fiction and nonfiction, have the ability to captivate kids and inspire and motivate them. Yes, fiction is well, fiction, a made-up story. But in fiction, there is a lot of truth, and in my book, the heart of the truth lies in what caused global warming. The description of what caused our climate crisis is true, based on my research. The fiction is in 2030, when the book is set. No one can predict the future, but the warnings from scientists are increasingly dire.

What surprised you most about the process of writing this book?
The surprise and the difficulty was that the real world surrounding the events of climate change were constantly shifting as I did my research and wrote my book. We went from Obama, trying to fight climate change, to Trump, basically denying it, to Biden, trying to fight it but the Republicans blocking him and a lot of back and forth on the international stage, all while historically hotter weather and increasing extreme weather events showed vividly that scientific predictions about climate change getting worse were true.



Peter Aronson, author [www.peteraronsonbooks.com;