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 and Clarios have partnered to create The Curious Crew Explores: The Battery Town, a children's book on energy storage built with the engineers who build the real thing. Battery Town is book one of The Curious Crew's seven-part STEM Energy collection.

Clarios is a global leader in low-voltage energy storage, with decades of engineering behind the batteries that start cars and keep their systems running.

The children are the main characters, not the audience

Every Curious Crew book works the same way, and it is what we mean by science storytelling. The children are not the audience of the lesson but the main characters of the adventure, and their curiosity is what drives it. It leads them somewhere they never expected to go, and keeps them going through wrong answers and new questions until the mystery gives way.

Battery Town is a book for the children who keep asking.

It starts with a car that will not start

This book is written from the inside out. Children aged 5 to 12 do not simply learn about a battery from the outside. They go inside it.

The story begins on an ordinary street, where Mrs. Spark's car will not start. The children have many ideas about why, but none can be checked from out here. So they shrink down, slip past the casing, and enter her battery.

Inside, they find a town gone sleepy and slow, where Mr. Watt is still doing the carrying but has almost nothing left to carry.

Then they look next door, into Mr. Amper's battery, full of life, with everything running as it should.

Standing between the two batteries, the children realize what needs to happen: energy from one can move into the other.

The children are Sofia and Viktor, and the dog who goes in with them is called Mr. Tie.

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.

Every grown-up in the town is named after the electricity they work with: Mrs. Spark after the spark that starts an engine, Mr. Watt after the watt, the unit of power, and Mr. Amper after the ampere, the unit of current. A child who meets these words as neighbours meets them again years later in a physics lesson, already knowing what they do.

The foreman is Mr. Watt, 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.

Every page of that town was drawn by illustrator Andrijana Rico, reviewed by the engineers who design the real thing, and shaped with the same care for how a child's mind actually works. The technical review was led 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.

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.

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

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

Every translation was done by a person who knows a classroom in that country, never run through a machine, and that 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

The book does not end at the last page. A QR code inside opens a free app where children find out how much of the town they noticed and go back over the ideas they met there, alongside games, experiments and a voice reading the story aloud. 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

The book publishes on 28 September in English, German, Spanish, French, Turkish and Czech across global bookstores.

It is a hardcover for ages 5–12, a book to read together with a parent or teacher at the younger end, and each edition is sold under its own ISBN:

• English: 978-3-9505841-4-1
• German: 978-3-9505841-9-6
• Spanish: 978-3-9505841-5-8
• French: 978-3-9505841-1-0
• Turkish: 978-3-9505841-6-5
• Czech: 978-3-9505841-7-2

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.