Brown Bear and Oofie are best friends and together, they learn how to overcome obstacles in everyday life. These two adorable friends help the reader to understand how to cope with being verbally bullied, being confident with who they are, or even being brave and adventurous. Each illustration is drawn by hand and appeals to the young reader due to it's simplicity and cuteness. Brown Bear & Oofie are meant to look as if a child of a similar age drew them. Young readers can connect more this way because social issues are hard. Especially for young kids. Bring Brown Bear and Oofie into your family today!

Brown Bear and Oofie learn life lessons together. In "The Verbal Bully", Oofie (a purple doggie) has been bullied with mean and hurtful words. Brown Bear helps Oofie overcome her feeling of sadness by being a supportive best friend. Will Oofie overcome her sadness from being bullied? Will she discover how to cope with it? Find out and join Brown Bear and Oofie on their adventure. The word "Verbal Bully" is the featured word of the book highlighted in red, and gets explained throughout the story along with other supporting vocabulary words, highlighted in orange. All the words are then defined in easy to understand definitions after the story has ended at the back of the book. These adorable characters want to take you with them when they are learning new things like being true to your own identity, trying new foods, telling the truth, being adventurous, and the list goes on!!! Brown Bear and Oofie want to be a part of your children's lives. Take them home today!

I was trying to communicate with my girls one day, and was left frustrated and unable to get my message across to them in a way that really helped them out with their problem. I sat down and started drawing simple drawings and then told a short story to go along with it. The girls were able to connect with me and I saw my "words of wisdom" sink in to their brains. The girls have their favorite stuffed animal from when they were babies and I was inspired to create characters and give them a voice. Viola! Eureka! Shazam! Brown Bear and Oofie characters were born!

Brown Bear & Oofie are meant to look as if a child of a similar age drew them. I believe the young readers can connect more this way. Social issues are hard. Especially for young kids. From my observations, before deciding on how to illustrate my books, I saw my own girls and other kids their age gravitate towards artwork that appeared to have been drawn by children. The simplicity of it all was not only appealing but just made sense. It immediately opened the door for more communication and random conversation with my girls.  Random or not, it was a conversation and it worked. So after seeing this done repeatedly, I decided on my simplistic kid like drawings.

I was simultaneously inspired by how kids can play for hours and hours with one background and reusable stickers, or paper dolls, or an app on their device that is basically a virtual paper doll set. That is why the background never changes in my books. I wanted to focus on the message and the details of the character's expressions and emotions.

Masami S.C. is a pseudonym created by Serena Masami Caspary and the sole purpose of this was to show my girls that it is never too late to embrace things. Growing up, I too was bullied. Sometimes physically bullied but most of the time, verbally bullied. One of the easy targets was my Japanese middle name. I was the only “half Japanese kid in my class and no one really understood mixed races back then. I grew to truly hate my middle name and it wasn’t until I was making yet another point to my girls, that it dawned on me that using my middle name as my author/illustrator name would be appropriate and even though it has been 30 plus years, I am standing up to my childhood bullies.  It is never too late for change.