Inside The Battery Town: How We Made a Children's Book About Energy

There is a town where energy goes to work. Very few people have seen it, because it is roughly the size of a shoebox and sits under the bonnet of a car.

The Curious Crew Explores: The Battery Town is our new picture book, made with the engineers at Clarios. It begins the way most curiosity begins: with something that stops working.

It reaches bookstores shortly. If you would rather be told the day it lands in your country than read to the end, that is entirely fair:

It starts with a car that will not start

Sofia and Viktor are playing outside when their neighbour Mrs. Spark's car refuses to wake up. Viktor has a theory, delivered with total confidence: it ran out of fuel. He is wrong, and being wrong is the door into the whole book.

Because the real question turns out to be better than the wrong answer. If the car is full of fuel and still will not start, then something else has run out. Something you cannot see. Where did the energy go?

What follows is a shrinking. Sofia, Viktor and their dog Mr. Tie become smaller than a raindrop and find themselves inside the battery itself, in a town of tunnels and archways that has gone quiet.

The town, and the people who live in it

The town is populated by golden messengers, who spend their working lives carrying parcels of power to the headlights, the radio and the engine. When the children arrive, the messengers are sitting down. Their parcels are empty.

Their foreman is Watt, named after the unit of power, who wears spectacles and a name badge and explains the thing the whole book is built around:

We are not broken. We are just empty.

Viktor, being small, offers his own energy — he has plenty, he has been running all morning. Watt turns him down kindly. The battery needs a very specific kind of energy, electrical energy, and that can only travel in from outside.

That distinction is the heart of it. A flat battery is not a broken battery. Energy is not a single substance that things either have or lack; it takes particular forms, and the form matters.

Every invented thing in it is true

A town of messengers is a fantasy. What they do is not.

The book was technically reviewed by Meriem Akin, Platform Engineering Project Lead at Clarios, whose name is printed on the title page beside the author's and the illustrator's. Nothing that teaches went into the story without going past someone who builds these things for a living.

The clearest example is a truck driver called Mr. Amper, who used to leave his engine running all night to keep his cab warm. In the book his battery now has a sensor that watches the charge and tells him when to act. That is not invented either: real-time battery monitoring does exactly that in commercial fleets today, cutting idling and the fuel that goes with it. We wrote about the partnership behind the book when it began.

There is a page near the end that says, plainly, that electrical energy is powerful and belongs to trained adults, and that a wire or a battery which looks broken is a thing to tell a grown-up about. A book that makes batteries fascinating has an obligation to say that out loud.

Energy and power are not the same word

One spread does a job most adults cannot do on request. Energy is how much you have stored up, like a child sitting still, full of life and ready to go. Power is how fast it flows, like that same child sprinting as hard as their legs will carry them.

Starting a car needs a great deal of power all at once. That is why Mrs. Spark's battery cannot do the job even though it still has something left in it — it cannot send what it has quickly enough. Two words that get used interchangeably every day, separated by one picture of a boy running through a field.

Six languages, six titles

The book was written in English and published in six languages. Every translation was done by a person who knows a classroom in that country, never run through a machine — which is why the titles are not copies of one another. German children meet a Neugierbande; Turkish ones meet Meraklı Ufaklıklar.

The battery you can turn around

The book has a companion the shelf cannot hold. On the book's own page there is a 3D model of the battery the story happens inside, the real one, modelled part for part. You can drag it, spin it, and open four points on it, each of which lifts a page out of the book.

It is the closest we can get to what the story does: take an object children see every week without ever looking at, and make it worth turning over in your hands.

The story does not stop at the last page

Every copy has a QR code printed in the back, and it is free. Scanning it opens games, experiments, and a voice reading the story aloud: the same book, carried on in a phone or a tablet. There is no account to make behind it.

The audiobook matters more than we expected it to. A child who cannot yet read the words can still be read to, at the same pace, in the same order, by the same narrator, as many times as they want.

Where to find it

It is a hardcover for ages 0–12, sold through bookstores globally under ISBN 978-3-9505841-4-1, For 100 copies or more, for a school, a library or a reading programme, write to team@curious-crew.com and we will handle it directly.

Energy never really goes away. It moves, changes shape, and turns up somewhere else, which is a reasonable description of curiosity as well.