All it took was an especially cute baby name for Christine Corrigan Mendez and Jen Monika McCurdy to get started on their passion project.
The licensed professional counselors from St. Louis had been thinking about writing a children’s wellness book for some time, and the youth mental health crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic made such a resource feel even more vital. Then, in August 2021, as Mendez was standing on her back porch, an idea came to mind. One of her extended family members recently gave birth to a baby named Clementine. “And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh!” Mendez says. “What a wonderful name—who could Clementine be? What could this story be?”
From there, a book series was born.
Clementine Gets UNSTUCK!, the first installment in Mendez’s and McCurdy’s Kids Can Club Collection, will be released on July 27. The book tells the story of Clementine, a joyful third-grader who is determined to work on her mental health and untangle the messy thoughts rattling around in her head so that she can better communicate with her peers. Readers follow Clementine as she navigates a normal school day and learns a simple wellness exercise from her school counselor to help calm her mind. With that knowledge, Clementine forms a club to help other children: the Kids Can Club.
And yet, the club isn’t merely limited to the pages of a book. The series will show young readers how they, too, can form wellness clubs to help themselves, the environment, and even adults. In that sense, the book is much more than a children’s picture book. It’s also a teaching tool that utilizes the engaging elements of graphic novels and combines them with wellness resources that are explained in ways that elementary school-aged children can understand. As the pandemic has illustrated, it’s crucial for kids to learn these wellness exercises at a young age.
“That’s the hope with accessibility: to empower them with whatever tools that will work for them, adapt them to what is needed at that moment, and then maybe become a little bit more grounded,” McCurdy says.
Mendez and McCurdy initially met while attending graduate school for counseling at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. They later realized that they had similar interests and worked well as a team, forming a program to help other counselors learn how to become licensed. Now, they’re hoping to make an impact with children through the rollout of their Kids Can Club series.
Clementine Gets UNSTUCK! is only the beginning. The co-authors plan to soon launch additional books. Each one will feature new characters who find solutions to different issues. In between book publications, Mendez and McCurdy plan to post short stories online so that kids can read and respond to wellness-related current events in real time. The goal, Mendez says, is to use the kids’ journeys to empower, engage, and create authentic representation for neurodivergent children.
“It’s about being able to have children look and say, ‘I see myself here,’” Mendez says.
