Global Warning

by Steven B. Frank

Overview

A group of 12-year-old friends concerned about climate change proposes a new way to save the earth: amending the U.S. Constitution. Their project propels these activists on an amazing journey across America—and all the way to Norway—with plenty of outside-the-box hijinks and civil disobedience, as they work to save the planet and their futures on it. 

For sixth grader Sam Warren and his friends Catalina, Alistair, Jaesang, and Zoe, the effects of climate change are too pressing to ignore. Adults don’t seem to be up to the challenge of taking action to make real change, but kids know it’s their futures on the line. If their parents, teachers, and government officials won’t step up well, then, they will! 

And these young people will stop at nothing to save the planet and their futures on it. With a little help from a retired kids' rights lawyer and a grandma who knows how to march, they are ready to think big: Constitutional amendment big. But can a bunch of 12-year-olds really draft an amendment that protects the planet, get it to pass in Congress, and change enough hearts and minds across the country to get it ratified before the clock runs out? 

Steven B. Frank crafts another funny and fast-paced story of heightened-reality wish-fulfillment, loaded with the witty patter of smart kids, in this book that reads like Aaron Sorkin for middle grade and plumbs the complexities of the Constitution and the critical turning point of global climate change. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358566175
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Steven Frank is the author of The Pen Commandments, a guide to writing that Booklist called “funny, inspiring, personal, moving, and often hilarious."  His middle grade short fiction and plays have appeared in Weekly Reader’s Writing and Read magazines. He is also a beloved middle school teacher at Le Lycee Francais of Los Angeles, where his students often intentionally misbehave because he punishes them with fun writing assignments.

www.stevenbfrank.com

Twitter @stevenbfrank

Editorial Reviews

"Implausible but engagingly suspenseful—and not, tantalizingly, actually impossible." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2022-12-24
The intrepid middle schoolers who took a case to the U.S. Supreme Court in Class Action (2018) aim higher.

Again challenging credibility but delivering a bracing lesson in motivational civics, Frank unleashes his quartet of seventh grade crusaders—with new allies and legal coaching from a nonagenarian neighbor—on the climate crisis. Motivated by frightening signs of climate change and incidents of heedless pollution, 12-year-old Sam Warren and his friends determine that the quickest way to short-circuit impending catastrophe would be a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a planet free from “pollution and unnatural warming.” All they have to do is get a proposal through Congress and then have it ratified by three-quarters of the states. The first turns out to be relatively easy…but the second becomes a nail-biting campaign against a negotiated deadline that tests the ingenuity of the young eco-warriors and finally forces them into a desperate, spectacular, last tick public protest. Along with a reference to the Juliana v. United States climate suit and other real-life examples of youth activism, Frank slips actual figures into the cast, some thinly disguised (West Virginia Gov. Jim Law, a congressperson whose initials happen to be AOC) and others not (like the indomitable Greta Thunberg), and rounds off the buoyant close with an annotated list of constitutional amendments—all 28 of them. Names and other cues point to a racially diverse central cast.

Implausible but engagingly suspenseful—and not, tantalizingly, actually impossible. (Fiction. 10-13)

Kirkus Reviews