Week One into quarantine,
and we were already tired of waking up to a barrage of bad news—COVID-19 had spread to every continent, infected half a million people and counting, overwhelmed hospitals 🏥, crashed stock markets 📉, displaced renters 🏠, emptied public spaces 🏞️, and separated friends and families. We quickly realized that this is a generation-defining moment, that for those 🧒🏻 🧒🏼 🧒🏽 🧒🏾 🧒🏿 growing up during the time of coronavirus, the trajectory of their lives will be permanently altered by the decisions made through this crisis. We decided to write a story for them, and The Big Thing was born.
“How hard could writing a children’s book be?” I asked Alex. File this statement under “obvious foreshadowing”. 🙄
We couldn’t find an authentic voice for our main character, Bea, without sounding detached, condescending even, like an adult talking down to a child. We oversimplified ✂ some parts of the story that needed emphasis, and overcomplicated 🧠 some parts of the story that needed clarity. An average children’s book is 1,200 words, so every line has to count. We sent drafts of the story to our friends who were authors and received 📧 responses like this:
Alvaro gave life to our characters. He gave Bea pigtails, blue overalls, and a sense of adventure 🎒. He gave her mother a quarantine bun 👱♀️ and her father a quarantine beard 🧔. He gave her teacher, Mrs. Eva, an indomitable smile 👵🏼.
😰. After a ton of research 🔬 and several drafts, the story was finally starting to make sense. Now we needed it to come to life, but neither I nor Alex could draw ✏️.
Enter Alvaro 👨.
Alvaro is an Uruguayan designer and artist, he talks to inanimate objects and laughs 😄 a lot. We had many zoom calls between the three of us: me in California 🌴, Alex in Wyoming ⛰️, and Alvaro in Montevideo 🏖️. In Alvaro’s presence, the world smells like mangos 🥭.
Our friends Jill 🇨🇳, Freddy 🇳🇮, Gimena 🇺🇾, Carole🇨🇭, Thaisa 🇧🇷, Monika 🇩🇪, Marz 🇵🇱, and Danna 🇮🇱 came on board as well, helping us translate the story into Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German, Polish, and Hebrew. We had to find the different languages’ equivalent of “silver lining”, and there was a kerfuffle over whether a cupcake 🧁 is a “magdalena” or a “ponquesito” in Spanish. I learned that translation is an art form 🎨, a translator not only interprets the text, but re-writes it in a whole other language’s culture, history and tradition.
This is a book about finding silver linings, about family 👪, love ❤️, duty and most importantly, resilience 💪. We wanted Bea to learn about finding good in the bad, we wanted her to notice the sky turning bluer as the world slowed down and our environment began to heal, we wanted her to reach out to her friends and family and teacher when things got tough, because we cannot conquer fear on our own.
So here is our book 📙. We hope you and your family enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it.
Love 💌,
Angela, Alex + The Big Thing team