Picture book creator and muralist Katie Yamasaki combines storytelling with hands-on collaboration, and her Earth Month book tour for Ripples (Norton, Apr. 7) comes with opportunities to take outdoor environmental action. Yamasaki’s tour stops in April focus on protecting the planet and the dictum that many hands make light work.

The activities will echo the narrative in Yamasaki’s Ripples, which opens with a woman and child paddling an orange raft down a gentle river, waving hello to families who are picnicking, climbing, and playing. Monarch butterflies flutter, geese fly overhead, and raccoons and beavers forage near the water’s edge. When the river opens into a lake, the travelers notice litter in the water and begin to collect it in bags. “It is a lot for two people,” the narrator states, but the kids and caregivers they saw along the way arrive in their own rafts to help, “and we make ripples.”

The book ends with a work party, yet Yamasaki’s illustrations emphasize the warm summer day. “When the children start to take action around the water, one kid finds a milkweed pod and opens it up, and another kid is drawing a willow tree,” she told PW. “They’re not only picking up trash, which is a meaningful activity, but they’re also listening to nature and responding.” She said she tried to convey “the sensory experience of one of those days where you feel the sun just right, and you can hear the water and the nature around you.”

When Yamasaki visits Brooklyn, N.Y., on April 19, a reading and book signing with Books Are Magic will be followed by a tree-weeding activity facilitated by Brooklyn Bridge Park organizers.

“Because this is spring, we’ll be doing a tree-weeding and lawn-cleanup activity—it’s not as water-intensive as in the book,” Books Are Magic events director Amail Gordon-Buxbaum told PW. Once Yamasaki finishes her reading and signing, “kids can get down and dirty sprucing up the area. We’re putting in added precautions and steps, and going back and forth with the Brooklyn Bridge Park team” for a safe experience, Gordon-Buxbaum said. BBP provides the equipment and educators, and caregivers sign a waiver on the bookstore’s RSVP page.

Cooperation is the theme of more events with the bookstore. A week after Yamasaki’s visit, Books Are Magic will host the launch of Frederick Joseph’s Planting Hope, illustrated by Paul Kellam (Candlewick, out now), with an activity in a community garden. “We’re going to the Secret Garden on DeGraw Street, near our Smith location, and doing a seed planting activity after the storytime,” Gordon-Buxbaum said.

Next, when Yamasaki goes to Minneapolis on Earth Day, April 22, she’ll be hosted by both Wild Rumpus Bookstore and the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, which will teach attendees about stormwater runoff. MWMO environmental outreach coordinator Michelle Spangler said, “We’re going to be talking about connections between storm drains and the river, and telling kids about our Adopt a Drain program.” Actionable plans will be possible, she said, because “once you’ve learned about the river and why it’s important, you and your family can adopt a storm drain. We’re helping them imagine how they can be river warriors.” Spangler said that if families from a few neighborhoods participate, the information “multiplies like a chain reaction”—a metaphor akin to causing ripples.

In addition to the dates in Brooklyn and Minneapolis, Yamasaki will stop in for a Be the Change event at Boston’s Porter Square Books on April 16, with 20% of sales benefiting Massachusetts food pantry Food for Free. She’ll also participate in an April 20 panel about kids’ environmental books at Washington, D.C.’s Politics & Prose, and she’ll join Boulder Bookstore and the Colorado nonprofit Protect Our Rivers for an April 24 Earth Week cleanup at Sloans Lake in Denver.

Mother Earth

The environmental events came about when Yamasaki’s publicity team recognized that life could imitate art. Norton Young Readers marketing manager Naomi Duttweiler initially set up the partnership between Books Are Magic and Brooklyn Bridge Park, “which became my jumping-off point for adding nonprofits in other cities,” said Nicole Banholzer, managing director of Nicole Banholzer PR. “In each case, minus Porter Square, I reached out directly to nonprofits and then looped in a bookseller.”

In a tangible way, the book tour follows the picture book’s model. While creating Ripples, Yamasaki reflected on care. “I was thinking a lot about the word mothering, as a verb, rather than mother as a noun,” she said, because all kinds of people nurture each other. She’d planned to set the book in a classroom, yet the river project emerged as she began to “connect the care that children receive to their own agency to care for the Earth.”

She joked, “This is my first book where there are no buildings, not that that made it any easier” to illustrate.

Ripples developed as Yamasaki imagined people of all ages making observations and being considerate of other living things. “The actions don’t need to be complicated, and they probably already know how to do them,” she said, whether it’s figuring out “what do the pollinating plants need in my community, or what do the urban birds need in terms of a stoop or backyard? What can you do with what you have?” The outcomes may not be visible immediately, Yamasaki said, but there’s a cumulative effect.

As an author-illustrator and activist, Yamasaki moves step-by-step toward matters of concern. “I did a fundraiser and a donation around getting my picture book Dad Bakes into correctional facilities’ parenting programs, and then into agencies around the country that support kids who have an incarcerated parent, and I did the same with Place Hand Here,” she said, noting that Norton Young Readers “made sure that the binding was the right kind that could get into a correctional facility.” Acknowledging that no one can be an expert in every subject, she advised, “Touch base with the nonprofit partner on how they engage volunteers, because they probably have a heightened level of experience with that versus the bookstore or the author.”

She went on to say, “The thing that sometimes works is that you find people who care deeply about these issues, and they will be motivated to figure out the tricky parts, those little hassles that can be roadblocks. The more partners you can have, the bigger the scope, the bigger the reach, and the broader the expertise.”

Ripples by Katie Yamasaki. Norton, $18.99 Apr. 7; ISBN 978-1-3240-5394-1