Brooklyn Writer Revisits Sibling Acceptance in New Children's Book

Bess Kalb has a knack for making kids laugh without ever talking down to them. Her new children’s picture book, Buffalo Fluffalo and Puffalo, is the follow-up to her bestselling debut Buffalo Fluffalo, and it extends the world of one very, fluffy buffalo who charms children from Brooklyn to Montana.

Kalb, a Park Slope resident, says her latest installment felt like coming home to a character she already loved.

“The first book was inventing an entire world,” she said. “I had to create this character and a whole cast of friends: Ram, Prairie Dog, Crow, Buffalo Fluffalo. With the second book, the world was already there. The book grows up a little bit. It’s a new experience with characters I’d already created.”

The story follows a gruff and older Buffalo Fluffalo, and how he learns to love and appreciate Puffalo, a new sibling. 

Kalb, known for her comedy writing on television including on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, didn’t always picture herself as a children’s book author. Yet she insists she naturally gravitated toward kids long before she ever wrote for them.

“Even when I worked in comedy, I was writing sketches with and about kids," she said.

The instinct to honor a child's humor became the core of her work. When she hit the road on a cross-country book tour, she watched it unfold in real time.

“I was just in Montana, Missouri, Kansas, Texas; places very different from Brooklyn,” she said. “I looked at the faces of these kids, and they were just loving it. There’s this universal comedy language in children’s books. It transcends any demographic background or socioeconomic class or home situation.”

In St. Louis, she read to children displaced by a tornado. Some were first-generation refugees. Many came from circumstances far removed from her son’s cozy Brooklyn world, the kid for whom she first wrote Buffalo Fluffalo during the pandemic.

“To see this story balloon into a universal experience has been the most rewarding and sweet result I could imagine,” she said. “Kids come to the book with an open heart. They’re a blank slate, and maybe this story becomes one of the things that shapes them. That’s the loftiest goal, and hopefully attainable.”

Writing for children is fast, she admits; “tens of thousands fewer words”—but not easier. “You still want a moment of suspense, sweetness, a hero’s journey,” she said.

Kalb still remembers the first time she realized her debut book had a real footprint.

“I’ll never get over seeing my book in a bookstore,” she said. “When I saw it on the bestseller shelf at Books Are Magic, I turned to the person working there, who was just trying to do their job, and said, ‘I’m Buffalo Fluffalo. I wrote that.’ They were like, ‘That’s great, will you sign some stock?’” 

Though born on the Upper West Side, Kalb says Brooklyn has become the heart of her family’s life. After a decade in Los Angeles, she moved back three years ago with her husband and children.

“Brooklyn feels like a paradise for raising kids,” she said. “My sons get lost in the woods in Prospect Park. My niece and nephew do nature camp. Our backyard is public parks.”

Her parents have since moved to Brooklyn, and her extended family is spread across Crown Heights, Park Slope and Jersey City. “The whole village is here,” she said. “It feels great.”