Kristen Bell’s kids book ‘ . . . Purple People’ urges us to find ways to get past what divides us

Instead of focusing on the political divide between red and blue, Kristen Bell wants people to start seeing purple.

So she and close friend Benjamin Hart have written a new children’s book, “The World Needs More Purple People,” in which a girl named Penny Purple tries to learn what a purple person is — and how she can become one.

Why a children’s book? “There’s a high probability that, if a child is reading this book, a parent is either near or reading it to them,” says Bell, who starred in the NBC-TV series “The Good Place,” played Anna in Disney’s animated hits “Frozen” and “Frozen II” and does voice work on the upcoming animated series “Central Park,”

The idea for the book came as she and Hart “were just lamenting the fact that adults spend a lot of time arguing. It occurred to us that our children are running around us, absorbing everything we talked about. And we were all talking about divisiveness.”

It’s no accident that red and blue, the colors used to represent the U.S.’s two major political parties, make purple.

Bell, who’s mom to 7-year-old Lincoln and 5-year-old Delta, says purple people ask really great questions, are really silly, work hard and are happy and confident to be themselves.

A purple person, she says, is “someone who just wants to be a little bit better tomorrow than they were today.”