‘Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet’: A new vocabulary for children to express climate anxiety
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I have spent the last five years reading climate fiction for my PhD research – which sounds more glamorous than it is. It means a lot of late nights with dystopian novels, many scribbled margins, and a slowly accumulating awareness that most adult climate fiction, for all its ambition, tends to land in one of two traps: it either drowns the reader in despair, or it resolves the crisis a little too neatly. What it rarely does is leave you with something as simple as hope that feels earned. Which is why Rajat Chaudhuri’s Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet surprised me.
I came to this lucid and compact illustrated collection shortly after submitting my thesis, in that odd, untethered week when you don’t quite know what to do with yourself. I expected something gentle and educational – a children’s book about climate change, illustrated, designed for classrooms and for raising awareness. I wasn’t wrong about any of that. What I didn’t expect was to finish it in one sitting, or to feel, at the end, that I had just read something that understood what climate fiction is and how complex technological usage, like geo-engineering and alternative energy, can be passed on to children...