The Balloon Thief by Aneesa Marufu
Author Aneesa Marufu tells us about her story, The Balloon Thief and how it went from being an adventure to something altogether more important and thought provoking. There is an event to celebrate The Balloon Thief on Instagram on the 10th of March. Details can be found at the end of this blog post.
The Balloon Thief first started out as simply a way to quell my obsession for things that fly and so I began by writing a story about an unlikely heroine thrust into immediate danger and adventure the moment she steals a hot air balloon. But as the story unfolded and my characters began to develop minds of their own, I knew then that there was a more important story that I wished to tell.
The idea to write a story about the impact of racism in a fantasy world came about firstly for my love of fantasy as a genre for its ability to explore different worlds and cultures without the constraints of reality. I have always loved reading and learning about different cultures, so what I wanted to show with The Balloon Thief was the impact of racism and racial segregation on the two main characters, who are from two opposing races, and how they manage to still preserve their friendship even when society is forcing them apart. As the two characters learn about one another and grow to trust each other, they discover that they are not as different as they originally thought and that is when their prejudice and preconceptions about the other start to melt away. I think this is a very important message in the multicultural world that we live in today that prejudice and intolerance often come from a place of fear and a lack of understanding, with education and integration being able to address that.
Writing a fantasy world based on South Asian culture was incredibly exciting, and it had me thinking about the types of books I used to read as a teenager when diversity and representation was not as apparent in fiction as it is now. I remember only a handful of books that included diverse main characters or embraced different cultures, and those are the books I remember standing out to me. Seeing now a surge in diverse fiction, especially across children’s and YA, makes me so happy knowing there is a new generation of readers growing up seeing themselves represented within books. It is one of the reasons why featuring a girl wearing a hijab on the cover off The Balloon Thief was so important to me. Readers tend to connect and resonate with books they feel represent them, perhaps because the story feels more personal. Even if readers cannot relate to a story about two friends saving the world in a hot air balloon, they can relate to the feelings of prejudice and unbelonging that the two characters are facing. I’ve always found that the books that tend to stay with us long after we’ve read them are the ones we feel represent us, and fantasy is no exception.
Aneesa Marufu’s The Balloon Thief is published by Chicken House Books
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