A Mother-Son Book Bake-Off

Hyatt Bass wrote a novel, The Embers. Her 5-year-old son wrote a book from a kit, The Super-brothers. And when both books launched at once, chaos ensued in their home.

Up until a few months ago, our son Jasper spent his time like most of his pre-K peers: constructing rocket ships and submarines out of blocks, crates, and cardboard boxes, and “acting out” superhero and Star Wars movies he’d never actually seen. In fact, it should be said that for all his tough-guy bravado, he recently deemed both Mary Poppins and a TV episode of Hello Kitty “too scary” to watch. This is a great source of amusement to our friends, especially because my filmmaker husband recently wrote Shrek 4—the ultimate daddy-job, presumably, for the myriad of children out there who have watched the first three Shrek movies over and over, and would give anything to know what happens in the next. Jasper couldn’t care less.

When People magazine featured my novel, Jasper gazed at the photograph with confusion and dismay. “Oh!” he cried out. “That’s not fair! Why can’t my book be in the magazine?

And so it is ironic that the particular havoc in our home at this very moment comes from Jasper’s sudden need to make his own film. But before the film, there was a book. Two books, actually. His and mine. Mine, a novel about a family, took seven years to write, and is being published this month. His, also about family in a sense, is the product of a make-your-own-book kit he got for Christmas—the perfect gift for a boy who asks us every night to make up a bedtime story, and then interrupts us to explain how the story should be different. On the box, there was a picture of a boy holding up a book with his own illustration, and the title and his name professionally typeset on a hard, red leather cover. Jasper and I dove in right away.

He decided his main characters would be two Super-brothers: Jasper and Hayden (his real-life younger brother), who have a favorite book about a magical forest. One day, they jump inside the book, where they discover that by pressing a magic button on a machine, they are able to get any kind of food they want, “hot dogs, spinach, ice cream, anything!” When the machine breaks down, and there is no food for anyone, the super-brothers come to the rescue with their incredible battery, which is “thirty hundred times powerful.”

After we’d mapped out his story together, Jasper faced the task of getting it down on the pages provided. I figured his interest might wane after the first page or two, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Any afternoon that my own writing schedule allowed, he insisted on working on the book. I would take dictation, writing in the space provided, and would then pass him the paper so that he could draw a picture.

Several weeks later, we packed the finished manuscript into an envelope and mailed it off to the book kit’s “publisher.” What we got back had us jumping around the kitchen for nearly an hour: twenty beautifully bound copies of The Super-brothers by Jasper Bass-Klausner, with his cover drawing of two boys in red-and-black capes. At this point, my book was still in galley form. So, not only had he gotten to make a book like me, but his was even more real-looking than my own. For a boy bordering on age 5, what could have been better?