writing the Book Uncle and Me trilogy: an interview with Uma Krishnaswami

Please tell us about the Book Uncle books. How did this series begin? Were there any hiccups along the way? (Book Uncle is a story of perseverance and serendipity. I’d love for readers to get a glimpse of that!)

The series began with a single title, Book Uncle and Me, which in turn began as a short story because at the time I didn’t really think I had enough words in me to write anything longer. For a brief period, it was part of a story collection that collage artist and illustrator Susan Roth and I batted around but that never went anywhere. Finally, I wrote it out in chapters, mostly because I felt an urge to, well, do something. The characters took shape and began to own the story. I was pleased with that shift. 

In this form, it got rejected by a couple of editors in the US. They were, I think, a little baffled by it. They thought it was a little too agenda driven. They wondered if a story about politics would be of interest to young people. 

So I revised it a couple more times, trying to clarify the storyline, trying to make it speak for itself, and sent it off to a manuscript competition sponsored by Scholastic Asia in Singapore. To my surprise, it won! Part of the prize was publication by Scholastic India. It came out in 2012 in a lovely, brilliant yellow-jacketed edition with illustrations by Priya Kurian. Then it was picked up by Groundwood for the 2016 North American edition you’ve seen, with art by Julianna Swaney. So that’s the short version, replete, as you can see, with boatloads of hiccups. Could the watchword for its journey be stubbornness, perhaps? I just had a soft spot for that story and at some level I couldn’t accept that it wasn’t working. 

Your next book in the series, Birds on the Brain, released in August. What can you tell us about this story?

Birds on the Brain is the story of a kid who is wild about birds so when the local bird count seems threatened, she realizes she has to get involved. Of course, she pulls in her two best friends. In short order, they’re planning a survey of the neighborhood, they’re resolving problems that crop up among themselves, and they’re taking on the grownups in their lives. Oh, and they’re facing the mayor and—eek!—the entire city government. 

Reeni can pull this off because she just won’t take no for an answer. This is a story about a kid who pays keen attention to her place in the world, and to everything with wings and beaks. It’s also a story about a group of friends and their families and the community around them and where they all fit into a big wide world. 

Birds on the Brain was released simultaneously in a North American edition from Groundwood Books and an Indian edition from Duckbill/Penguin Random House India. 

I’d like to point you as well to:

• my conversation with Inderjit Deogun of the Canadian book trade journal Quill and Quire, in which I talk about the origin story of Birds on the Brain. It’s important to me that it grew out of a question raised by a reader. 
• and to these interviews by writer and VCFA graduate Jen Breach with me and illustrator Julianna Swaney when this book was published.

Each of your books is narrated by a different character. How did this challenge (or aid) your writing process?

The first thing I did, once my proposal for a sequel had been accepted by the publisher, was to reread Book Uncle and Me very carefully. I marked up all the pages where Reeni showed up, to recall everything that I already knew about her. I noted personality traits, speech patterns, dialogue, as well as observations about her made by Yasmin, who is the narrator in the first book.

Then, because I’m always temporally challenged, I thought about how much time had elapsed from the end of Book 1 to the beginning of Book 2. The couple of months I decided upon gave me room to figure out how her interests might have narrowed and focused. Quite a lot of this character shaping emerged from discussions with my editor on early drafts. 

Slowly, I began to understand what I’d need to do to change Reeni from a secondary character into the narrator and protagonist she’d have to be in the sequel. I had to take this character who had played a supporting role and give her her own space. I added texture and detail to her home, her family, her cultural and religious background. I’d decided she was Syrian Christian so I had fun with the architecture of the church the family attends, and the details of the Syrian Orthodox service. Reeni’s pretty outspoken, so I had a lot of fun working in her perceptions of the neighborhood and community. It felt a little bit like visiting a place I’d already been to, but this time I had a different guide showing me around. A pretty vocal guide who wasn’t bashful about stepping up and claiming agency.

And because I knew I was now writing a trilogy, I could simultaneously begin to lay the ground in book 2 for the next shift—in other words, I thought about how to set Anil up for the similar leap he’d have to make in Book 3. He is a shy kid, so I made sure that we get to see a little more of him. I nudged Reeni to figure out why on earth Anil’s acting the way he is, when she’s asking him questions and he’s refusing to engage with her. In the process, I learned what makes Reeni tick, but I was also able to see her dawning insights into her friends’ wishes and dreams, likes and dislikes and motivations. 

What similar themes or ideas tie the series together?

I think the common themes might be the power of friendship and the importance of children’s voices. But what do I know? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about theme when I wrote the first book. 

What I’m very clear on is what these stories mean to me. They have given me the room to prioritize children’s funny, idiosyncratic, heartfelt opinions of an adult world they have to live in, a world that they only partially understand, and that they largely do not have control over. Yet in the pages of a children’s book, who else can we give agency to but children? That was the joyful part. If only for the duration of a story, one book at a time, it felt as if I was fixing something in fiction that often feels unfixable in the real world. 

What’s next for the Book Uncle books?

Book 3, The Sunshine Project will be out next year. Like Birds on the Brain, it will release simultaneously in Canada/US and India. Told from the viewpoint of the third friend, Anil, a karate enthusiast and peacemaker, the third book deepens the environmental theme of Book 2. When the kids come across villagers whose lives will be negatively affected by the city’s plans to fund a solar panel factory near a mangrove forest, they find themselves dealing with difficult questions in the realm of environmental justice. Anil has to overcome his diffidence and speak up in the presence of many important people who seem not to understand what he wants to say. I’m happy to say the book is firmly on the side of kids and their voices.