Saving Sunshine

Illustrated by Shazleen Khan

“You don’t have to fix the whole world. Sometimes saving one small thing is enough.”

Saving Sunshine follows Muslim American twins Zara and Zeeshan Aziz, whose constant arguments overshadow everything they do. When their family travels to Key West, Florida, for their mother’s medical award ceremony, their fighting escalates until their parents confiscate their phones. Forced to spend time together, the twins discover a sick sea turtle washed ashore.

Concerned for the turtle’s survival, Zara and Zeeshan take responsibility for helping it, contacting a local veterinarian and a sea turtle rescue center, and following expert guidance to ensure the animal receives proper care. Working alongside adult caregivers teaches them that protecting wildlife requires cooperative patience and respect for both animals and community knowledge. Their shared commitment to saving the turtle—whom they name “Sunshine”—gradually brings them together.

Saving Sunshine serves as a strong text to talk about working together, belonging, and being morally responsible. It offers a thoughtful and age-appropriate introduction to climate literacy, particularly in relation to animal conservation, environmental empathy, and interdependence between human and non-human species. Although the book does not frame climate change as a global systemic crisis, its intimate storyline foregrounds concrete ecological concerns, including habitat vulnerability, wildlife endangerment, and the consequences of human activity on coastal ecosystems. Saving the turtle demonstrates how slow environmental harm, due to neglect, pollution, and environmental stressors, accumulates over time and how collective care can interrupt that process.

The story encourages readers to think about the ethics of care by showing how small acts of protection, like saving one animal, can help the environment. The change from frustration to working together that Zara and Zeeshan go through shows that climate literacy means both knowing about environmental issues and being able to respond with kindness and creativity.

The graphic novel uses multimodal storytelling to make abstract ecological ideas more relatable and understandable. Shazleen Khan’s expressive color palette, panel pacing, and character design show the difference between conflict and connection, visually reinforcing the emotional and environmental growth of the protagonists. These strategies invite readers to engage with characters who are different from themselves. The twins’ Muslim American identity adds an important layer of environmental justice dimension to the story. Their experiences with microaggressions and assumptions show how social inequities intersect with questions of environmental care. The book suggests genuine environmental care requires empathy across differences, both human/nonhuman differences and differences among humans.

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©2026 ClimateLit (Santiago Iñarrea Las Heras)

Publisher: First Second Books, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, 2023

Audience: Ages 8-13

ISBN: 9781250793812

Pages: 224

Format: Comics and Graphic Novels

Topics: Climate Literacy, Conservation, Empathy, Environmental Destruction, Environmental Justice, Interconnectedness