A Little Unexpected Perspective (Guest post from The Pack-n-Go Girls’ Janelle Diller)

(Guest post from The Pack-n-Go Girls’ Janelle Diller)

Several years ago I was working on Mystery of the Thief in the Night, our Pack-n-Go Girls adventure about a girl from Seattle who sails to Mexico. Lisa, my business partner, and I had just made a conscious decision to make sure our American characters were as diverse as our international ones. And so I turned to my friend Angela, a first generation Chinese-American woman, for help in creating an Asian American character as the American girl in the story. She helped me, of course, with language and cultural details that I didn’t know. But the most important thing she did for me was to give me perspective. As we were winding down the conversation, she said, “Janelle, I’m so excited that you’re adding a Chinese American girl to your story. I can’t tell you how much it would have meant to me as a child to read a book that had a girl who looked like me in it.”