A satirical website offers up an inaccurate road trip through New Brunswick to teach kids about misinformation

Satirists offer-up new kids book Satirical website The Manatee has released a new book to educate children in the age of misinformation.

FREDERICTON — A road trip throughout New Brunswick courtesy of the satirical website The Manatee is trying to make a wider audience laugh with a children's book.

Two of its writers created That's Not True, in part to educate children in the age of misinformation.

"We know that a lot of the content on The Manatee is not really kid-friendly or it goes over their head, it's really not targeted towards kids," says co-author Brandon Hicks from St. Stephen, N.B.

"But we know that it's a solid name that parents identify and they do find funny. So we're hoping to bridge that communication where it's like, this is something culturally in New Brunswick that we do find funny and we like and we want to share it with our kids."

That's Not True takes a road trip through New Brunswick, hitting many of the province's major landmarks along the way.

"One of the big ones for me was turning Martello Tower in Saint John into Marshmallow Tower because that was a big joke that we all had as kids, and to finally sit down and try and draw that out was exciting for me to see it on paper," says Hicks.

The parents in the book give their kids the wrong information, and the children must think critically to correct the facts.

It also teaches kids an important lesson in media literacy.

"They'll see a headline and they'll assume it's true, so we wanted a kids book to kind of tackle that issue and say … 'You should check the sources, figure out if something's true, find out, verify, before you just believe something'," says co-author Shauna Chase in Fredericton.

The pair self-published the book.

"We wanted to get it out for this summer when people would be trying to get out and actually visiting these tourist spots," says Chase.

It was planned with pandemic travel in mind.

"A goal of ours is to have the parents take their kids out and hold the book up and really show them, we want it to be an interactive experience," Hicks says. "We don't have a lot of New Brunswick stories that kids can identify with, we want people to toss a copy in the back of the car while they do their staycation this summer."

The authors hope you'll take your own road trip to the book store to pick it up.

But it's also available to order through Amazon.