‘Ada Twist, Scientist’ Author Andrea Beaty on the Importance of Empathy
My conversation with the best-selling author on what is at the heart of her beloved books and why she speaks out on social issues
Welcome to So Many Thoughts, a semi-weekly newsletter about royal style and the other parts of life I want to think through with you. You can subscribe here and follow me on Instagram at @EHolmes. Thank you!
Hello, friends. I hope today’s newsletter will be a bit of a bright spot in these scary times. Below you will find my conversation with best-selling children’s book author Andrea Beaty. If you are new to The Questioneers series, which includes Ada Twist, Scientist and Rosie Revere, Engineer, then it’s my sincere honor to introduce you. And if these beloved titles are already in your home—as they all are in mine!—I think you’ll appreciate them even more after you read all the thought Andrea puts into writing them.
I was so inspired by our chat that I wanted you all to have a chance to hear directly from Andrea. Please join us on Instagram Live tomorrow, Wednesday, May 4, at 9am PT / noon ET. She will read her latest book, I Love You Like Yellow, and take your questions.
Take care, friends.
ICYMI: My newsletters on white blazers / grief as a form of love / Anna Wintour
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Aaron Slater, Illustrator is the latest addition to Andrea Beaty’s best-selling series, The Questioneers.
Andrea Beaty on Using Emotions to Empower Kids
I did something recently that I haven’t done in a long time: I reached out to a stranger on social media. Children’s book author Andrea Beaty was tweeting about her new book and I slid into her DMs to ask if she would be up for chatting with me. She very graciously agreed and the resulting hour-long conversation was one of the best I’ve had in a very long time.
Her bestselling series, The Questioneers, is one of my family’s favorites. Each one follows a second grade student as he or she solves a problem, answers a question or faces a fear. Along the way, the kids celebrate STEM, civic involvement, and the arts, while learning “the power of perseverance and standing up for what you believe in,” according to publisher Abrams Books. I get weepy every time I read them, moved to tears by the ways in which Andrea explains complicated emotions, including feeling embarrassed or overwhelmed. Her books empower kids in a way that is so needed.
I learned so much from my chat with Andrea, including how she started writing while her kids were napping, the hidden gems in the illustrations of her books, and why she is so vocal on Twitter about current events. Our conversation, below, has been lightly edited and condensed.
Andrea, hi! So thrilled to speak with you. Let’s start at the beginning. How did you become a children’s book author?
AB: I used to be a computer nerd. I did the phone tech support. That was 12 lifetimes ago! We were in St. Louis and my husband took a job up in Chicago. My son was six months old and we moved up to Chicago, and I did not go back to work in the corporate world again. I stayed home and suddenly was reading all these picture books. This was the early ’90s, which was a turning point in the quality and vast variety of picture books. It was an explosion! It just blew my mind. We would go to the library or the bookstore and come out with wagon loads of books. It was constant, all day, every day, reading to my kids.
All of our family was in St. Louis; my husband was working and traveling, I didn’t really know a lot of people. So in the many hours that moms have left over in a day…yeah right! (Laughs) Why, if you have two kids, can they not really nap at the same time? (Laughs again) In those gaps, I just started getting rhymes in my head, and thoughts, and ideas. And I started writing them down.
You have two kids who are grown now. How old were they when you started writing?
AB: Oh, geez. I would say two and three and a half, something like that. They were little. I remember when I first got them into preschool and I would suddenly have two hours. Oh, my goodness! What I could get done in two hours! Insane. Now I can’t get anything done in two hours, but back then I got stuff done. It was like, “Out of my way!” and a screech of the tires.
How did you land your first book deal?
AB: I had no idea if my ideas were good or not but I really enjoyed writing and decided I would start sending them out to publishers. I also joined a group called Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. I just got deeper and deeper into it and just had so much fun. Eventually, I found an agent and a publisher. And boy, the rest is history.
Before there was Ada Twist, Scientist, there was Iggy Peck, Architect. How did that book come to be? Did you know it was going to be a series?
AB: When my son was three or four he loved to build stuff. When I’m cooking, he’s taking the pans out of the cabinet and making towers, or soup cans out of the pantry. And at restaurants, he’s the kid with all the honey packets, or jelly packets, making towers. I'm sure that waitresses hated us.
So I got to thinking about a kid who loved to build things, and it’s really a book about passion.
Iggy was really a standalone book. I never envisioned anything bigger than that.
How did it become a series?
AB: When we sold the book, my editor wanted to work with [the illustrator] David Roberts. She says, “What do you think?” I really did not know who he was! But I said, “Of course. That is a very good idea.” And you know what? It was. From the text of Iggy Peck — there were no notes to say, “Return this with a beautiful class of diverse, marvelous, interesting kids” or anything — David came back with this glorious set of illustrations and that class of students.
Iggy was one of these marvelous, slow burns, where it just started off quiet, and the people in bookstores loved it, and then people in the stores at museum shops loved it. By word of mouth, it started getting a little bit more and a little bit more. My publisher asked, “Can you write another book about Iggy?” And I tried for a long time, but realized I had already written that book. What do I do now? He makes a house, and then he makes a barn? I was like, “I’m bored. I don’t want to do that.”
After a couple of years, the editor and I had the same thought, “Well, what about those other kids in the class?” And that was the revelation.
These pages from Sofia Valdez, Future Prez depict the second-grade class, drawn by illustrator David Roberts, which inspired the series.
That’s incredible. How did you choose Rosie Revere, Engineer as your next character?
AB: The marvelous thing about David is that everything—and I mean everything, Elizabeth—in his books, in any of his art, is on purpose. He says, “There’s no extras in his book, the characters are part of the world.” So they have personalities that he knows in his mind, things about them, but he doesn’t tell me. So I have to look at the clues that he tucks in there, and wonder, “What's that kid’s story?”
In the Iggy Peck illustrations, you see all the kids in the class, I think, four times, including Rosie. But you never see both of Rosie’s eyes. Her bangs are always swooping over her one eye. After months of looking at these pictures every day, I said, “What’s that about?” She is the smallest kid in the class, but she just looks like she wants to hide. I thought, “What’s her deal? What happened there? What's her story?” And that’s where Rosie came from. I made her an engineer because I wanted to see what David would do with those illustrations.
And after Rosie, I said, “Who else we got in this classroom?”
I love how each book has a theme. If Iggy is about passion, what about the others?
AB: Rosie Revere, Engineer is about engineering, but it’s really about perseverance. Ada Twist, Scientist is about curiosity.
Sofia Valdez, Future Prez I wrote after the 2016 election. I started hearing all of these stories about kids suddenly getting called names, or afraid that their family was going to be deported. There was so much fear and stress. I wanted to write something about being brave. I wanted kids to know that they are stronger than they know.
And how about your latest installment, Aaron Slater, Illustrator? What was the inspiration for that book?
AB: I’ve only gotten to meet David maybe two or three times in person, but I got to hang out with him in England a few years ago. We were talking about the kids, which up until then we really had never talked about. I would write the story and toss it over the fence via the editor, and David would do his art and toss it back over. He’s like, “I don’t want to step on your toes or in any way influence what you’re doing.” Which was exactly what I was like!
But when I did get to sit and talk with him, I asked him to tell me some things about these kids. He pointed out Aaron has these yellow socks. Aaron has a white T-shirt and some blue jeans, so he’s pretty invisible, clothing-wise, but he has bright yellow socks. And I thought, “Now there’s a kid who's got some pizzazz that he's just trying to keep under the radar. What is his story?”
His socks were telling his story! I love that.
AB: When I got to hang out with David, he really told me his story, too. David is dyslexic and he really struggled to read in school as a kid. But he could draw. His teachers recognized that he had his own way of expressing himself and tried to give him every opportunity to do that, to find his special place in the class through his art.
I wrote this book as an ode to David. I think this is my favorite of all the books.
There are some touches David put in the book that literally blow my socks off. They’re the ones that get me all misty, like the part where the teacher tells the class, “I would like you to write me something.” Everyone has a book open, and all of the letters of Aaron’s book have fallen onto the floor because it’s totally indecipherable to him. He cannot read. And he’s so heartbroken.
Some of the other kids are the same way, because David wanted to show that lots of kids struggle at some level. Some have a couple of letters out, others have a bunch. One boy, all of his letters are numbers. You can read these books over and over, and it’s that kind of detail that on the 10th reading you’ll go, “Wait a minute. Those are numbers.”
What is the bigger theme of Aaron’s book?
AB: It’s about beauty, and the power of beauty to heal us and to help us find our voice, I think.
The yellow rain coat, drawn by illustrator Vashti Harrison, in I Love You Like Yellow.
Tell me about your most recent book, I Love You Like Yellow. It’s such a departure from The Questioneers.
AB: I wrote this eight years ago, I think, before Rosie Revere, Engineer really hit the big time. When you’ve written a bunch of things, sometimes you need to just refresh your brain and look away, do something else. So I wrote this poem with really simple text and we sent it out to some editors. They were like, “Okay, but what happens in the pictures?” And I’m like, “Well, I don't want to decide that. I want to see what an illustrator will do.”
The beauty and the power of a picture book is in that space where the words and the illustrations come together. And when that works, that’s magic.
[The manuscript] kind of just got scooted to the side and tucked in the drawer. A couple years ago, I was at a conference and [illustrator] Vashti Harrison introduced herself. I’m such a fan of her work, I was so delighted. She shares all these illustrations on her Twitter and Instagram and had just shared a kid in a raincoat. It made me think: “Oh, yellow! I wrote a book about that!”
We sent it to her and she loved it, and decided she wanted to do it. And now it’s here.
Speaking of social media, I admire how you use Twitter to speak out about all kinds of topics, not just your books.
AB: Not everyone appreciates that, and I get it. But the whole Trump era for me, and now with COVID, all of the anti-gay, anti-trans policies. We are in moments in history that are truly transformative. These are moments that you don’t get to not take a side. You can’t not stand up for kids. You have to support kids. They need to know that somebody's going to have their back.
When you look back through history, there are times when terrible things happened because people did not stand up. I just don’t think it’s an option. Willful ignorance is going to be the death of us all, I fear. Because how do we expect kids to be able to grow up and handle the incredibly complex worlds that we are leaving them without the tools to do it? And the tools are empathy, and being able to reason.
I feel like you do that so well with the core tenets in your Questioneers series.
AB: Even the core tenets — of curiosity and bravery— that are in those books, you have to teach them first, to foster those feelings, so that when you get to the point where they’re old enough, and you can explain a little bit of historical events, they have that foundation of empathy.
And that's the biggest thing that books do for us, that they build that empathy. And without it, then you can so easily blame everyone else for your problems. You can be gaslighted because you never stop to think, “Well wait, those folks at the border who are trying to come in, what are they escaping from? What must their life be? How can we help?”
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Thank you so much, Andrea! You can buy her books at your local bookstore, on Bookshop, or Amazon.
Please join us on Instagram Live Wednesday, May 4 at 9am PT / noon ET. She will read her new book, I Love You Like Yellow, and answer your questions.
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Five Things To Check Out This Week
READ / An incredibly in-depth state-by-state look at what would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned, alogn with a link for where to donate if you are able. (Washington Post, Cosmopolitan)
READ / Of the many celebs making a statement on the Met Gala red carpet, Riz Ahmed deserves the most props for dressing as an “homage to immigrant workers.” (The Cut)
READ / “So, did you read what Dr. Becky posted?”...is something I often say to Matt. We are devotees of the Instagram parenting expert, so I was thrilled that my friend Elizabeth Angell profiled her. (Romper)
READ / Thanks to Julie for alerting me to this piece about the fashion at the NFL draft. We love to see thoughtful sports style. (New York Times)
SHOP / I was shopping for a white blazer and ended up buying two of these summery beaded bracelet sets. (J.Crew Factory)
Note: I use affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase I may get a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work!
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Hang in there, friends. I’ll see you on Instagram Live with Andrea Beaty tomorrow and will be back in your inboxes on Friday.
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