On this week’s episode of Working, Rumaan Alam talked with children’s author Stuart Gibbs about writing mystery novels for young readers. They talked about his shift to writing for kids, how he manages multiple projects, and his relationship with readers. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rumaan Alam: You talk about the complexity of writing a plot that is a crime plot that also talks about the extinction of an animal species. That’s a very serious thing. In the new FunJungle book, which is coming out in May,
, you’re doing a similar thing. There’s the fun plot that animates the story, which is, did this wild bear somehow accidentally steal this very expensive piece of jewelry? But underneath that, there’s a conversation about some serious things: sophisticated ideas about the relationship between white Americans and Native Americans, for example, or the stewardship of America’s public lands. As someone who has read these books to my