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Paper short abstract

Bringing children’s literature into dialogue with the blue humanities, this paper shows how A Whale of the Wild and The Wild Robot Protects use point of view, anthropomorphism, and ethically framed paratexts to render ocean climate change as lived, governable story‑worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper brings children’s literature into dialogue with blue humanities to show how Rosanne Parry’s A Whale of the Wild (2020) and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot Protects (2023) translate ocean climate change into legible, actionable story-worlds. I examine how point of view and anthropomorphic narration function as climate devices as they shape how readers sense marine change, attribute agency, and imagine governance across sea–shore interfaces. A Whale of the Wild, voiced by a first-person orca, renders warming waters, shifting prey, harmful blooms, and ship noise as lived oceanography, where currents, depths, and sound guide kinship decisions about routes, care, and hunting. The Wild Robot Protects, told in close third person with folktale-like brevity, treats the shoreline as a climate frontline: storms, poison tides, and human incursions prompt practical protocols that scale local care into a multispecies commons. Both books also use anthropomorphism strategically to convey perceptions and experiences of ocean-related multispecies communities to young readers, while paratexts and design elements (author acknowledgments of fieldwork and consultation, and illustrations) provide ethical guidance, steering readers away from overclaiming and toward informed care. Situated at the intersection of the blue humanities (Mentz; Oppermann) and post-anthropocentric children’s literature (Jaques; Oziewicz), and inspired by Min Hyoung Song’s “climate lyricism” (2021) and Bailey-Charteris’s “eco-aesthetics” (2024), the paper further argues that these narrative forms converge in a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction for young readers in a way that supports climate literacy without preaching and invites shared, ethically grounded care for a governable blue commons.