Teen Activists Start KRAPP to Impact Climate Change in Entertaining Call-to-Action
New York, NY, March 28, 2022 —After surviving what weather experts dubbed a MaineCane — the biggest hurricane to ever hit Maine — 13-year-old Mandalay Hawk is fed up with global warming. Taking advantage of the captive audience in the school cafeteria one day, she climbs onto the lunch counter intent on rallying the troops … and promptly steps into a vat of spaghetti and meatballs.
Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma: The United States of Anthropocene is an entertaining, energizing read for young audiences from former award-winning journalist Peter Aronson.
Readers are transported to the year 2030, and global warming is worse than scientists predicted. Climate protests have fizzled, and the world is on fire — all because adults didn’t want change badly enough. Mandalay’s family flees Maine after yet another one of Mandalay’s destructive protests and is greeted in Manhattan by palm trees and a rising Atlantic that threatens to swallow New York City.
Who better to compel young climate activists to spring into action than arebellious, troublemaking teenager with bright orange hair?
Mandalay and her pals start KRAAP — Kids Revolt Against Adult Power. They battle their parents, a principal and a government (and president) that wants to silence and stop them. They do things the old fashioned way: they study their brains out and ditch social media. There’s a march on Washington unlike any other and then there’s rapping in the Oval Office to a captive president. The kids aren’t leaving until they get what they want.
Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma is a primer of sorts for young climate activists, infused with real science and history regarding global warming. At its core, it’s an adventure story filled with teen angst and youthful indignance that ultimately serves as a love story for Mother Earth and a call-to-action for younger generations.
In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls the book: “A scathing work and an essential blueprint for youth battling climate change.”
Author Peter Aronson is a former journalist and attorney who now writes books for middle-grade readers. In 2015, Aronson realized that global warming was the biggest problem in the world. He decided to write a book that young readers could relate to, about kids fighting climate change because adults have messed up. Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma, published by Double M Books, Inc., is Aronson’s third middle-grade book.
