It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Elizabeth (Betsy) Mulderig’s latest book ‘Tiny and Sharkman Superheroes’!Her new children’s book, co-written with Debbie Jackson, aims to turn ordinary kids into superheroes through the simple act of reading.Ms Jackson said she was particularly pleased that the book was based in Bermuda, and the main character was a Bermudian boy.In the story, Tiny the tree frog and his friend Gilbert Pickles meet a sea wizard who gives them a book of sea wizard knowledge. The wizard tells Gilbert Pickles that he can become a superhero if he can read the hardest sentence in the book.“I am a social activist,” said Ms Jackson. “One of my special projects is children and literacy. It has been my focus in the last couple of years. That is how Betsy and I have become quite close around this issue. My father, Senator Albert Jackson, who died just a little over a year ago was an educator. He was one of the men who helped to design education in Bermuda in the last century.“Betsy has kindly honoured him and dedicated this book to him. It is about a young Bermudian child who becomes a superhero because he loves to read. He knows how to find the wisdom and knowledge of the world through reading. That is something that both of us feel very strongly about. The book is targeted at children from ages two to eight years old that is a time when children are really in their own imaginations. They love to make up stories about superheroes and fantastical things that can happen. Built into the book is the message about reading.”Ms Jackson said it was important that children have access to books that reflected their own communities.“I think that reading about their own culture is a key element,” she said. “I read to primary school children each week. I use Betsy’s books to read to them, but other books as well. When the Bermuda features come out they get so excited because they can identify them. They say, ‘oh yes I have been to the Aquarium’, or ‘we went to St George last week’. All of us want to know that we are included, and see that someone knows that we exist.”Shortly before Christmas, Ms Jackson and Ms Mulderig also teamed up to do a radio broadcast version of another of Ms Mulderig’s books ‘Tiny’s Night Before Christmas’. Ms Jackson did the voice of Tiny. They hope to make it into a television special along the same lines as ‘Charlie Brown’s Christmas’, but with Bermudian kids.Ms Mulderig has been reading the book to nursery and primary school students across the Island, and plans to make sure that schools have copies of the book in their libraries.“We are on a mission, and the mission is to get very young children clicked into reading before they can even read themselves,” she said. “We want to get very young children interested in loving reading just by the process of being read to.”‘Tiny and Sharkman’ is available in local bookstores.