Rea and the Blood of the Nectar by Payal Doshi

I believe all kids should see themselves represented in books because each kid should know that they can be the heroes of their own stories. It’s a story I would have loved to read as a kid and one in which I saw myself.ĭiverse representation, especially South Asian representation, is a mission close to my heart. So, I wrote a fantasy story rooted in Indian culture with Indian kids going off on thrilling adventures and becoming heroes. Right then, I knew I wanted to change that. If Lyra Belacqua, Harry Potter, and Nancy Drew can have incredible adventures, why can’t an Indian kid have them too? A girl like me never got to be the hero, have magic, or save a realm. I realized I should be proud of writing about my experiences and celebrating them with the world. I loved the food, the culture, the clothes, the deep sense of family, my years of schooling and university. When my writing teacher in India asked me with great disappointment why I hadn’t chosen to write about Indian kids (it was clearly not the first time she had come across a young Indian writer who had written about white characters), I felt deflated.

Without my knowing it, this diminished my identity, my experiences, my uniqueness, and my self-worth. That my own story, one that I hadn’t ever read about or seen portrayed, was not worth telling. Since I had only ever read children’s books with white characters, it had trained my mind into thinking that those were the stories worth telling. I didn’t think my Indian background was interesting enough to be the driving force of an exciting, heroic story. The plot of my novel was not based on the immigrant experience or rooted in the challenges of living in poverty or war (in the case of historical fiction), so I assumed no one wanted to read a book about a girl like me from India, going on an adventure, discovering she had magic, and being the ‘chosen one’ to save her brother and a magical realm. Never having seen myself in ‘happy’, ‘joyful’, ‘adventurous’, or ‘magical’ stories as a kid, my subconscious led me to write about characters who I had read about umpteen number of times doing those exact things, except they looked nothing like me. I was an adult, nearly 24 years old when I wrote the first draft. When I first began writing my debut novel, Rea and the Blood of the Nectar, I wrote all 70,000 words of it with white characters who lived in the English countryside.

Rea and the Blood of the Nectar by Payal Doshi