Laura Krantz

But parents listening with their kids and then teachers who were using elements of the podcast in their classes to talk about things like

DNA and the scientific method and how do we think about evidence, things like that.

And then that happened again with the second season of the podcast with all the space stuff and aliens and extraterrestrial life.

And my agent, well, she wasn't my agent at the time.

She was my husband's agent.

He's also an author.

And she said, you know, you really ought to consider doing some middle grade nonfiction books because this is an area where there isn't a lot of material.

And parents and librarians and teachers are always looking for books that are going to catch kids' imaginations, but also like help them understand facts and, you know, nonfiction books.

So yeah, that's really how the process got started.

So the first book was about Bigfoot.

It's called The Search for Sasquatch.

The second one was called Is There Anybody Out There?

And then the third book, the third season of the podcast is about nuclear energy.

I grew up in Idaho Falls, which is about 40 minutes from what is now the Idaho National Laboratory, but was once upon a time the National Reactor Testing Station.

And they were just...

doing some crazy stuff back in the 50s and 60s they were just like let's see how what the tolerances are of this reactor will it blow up and it did on many occasions um just scattering radioactivity all over the desert but in one case there was a reactor that blew up unintentionally and it killed three men and it's still the deadliest nuclear reactor accident in american history

I grew up in that area and I'd never heard about it.

So I ended up wanting to do a podcast about that.

But the book publisher was like, I don't think the kids are going to be really keen on the nuclear energy.

So come up with a different topic for the third book.