Pack-n-Go Girls is excited to be Platinum sponsors of Multicultural Children’s Book Day. We’re big believers in MCBD’s mission and have been part of it for years at various levels. Get Ready for a Changing World We’re often asked about why we started Pack-n-Go Girls. The first thing that comes to mind is how much fun we...
Dreaming of true-blue friends, mysterious adventures, and faraway places? Pack-n-Go Girls take you there!
Winner of the 2014 Gold Medal, Best Children’s Chapter Book Series, Moonbeam Children’s Book Award
2017 Bronze Sponsor!
From Janelle Diller: co-founder of Pack-n-Go Girls and is the author of the Mexico and Austria books.
(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.”
My earliest memories are of traveling. We’re in our two-toned white and chocolate brown Ford station wagon headed from Kansas to Florida. Family friends have joined us for the 4,000-mile trip—four adults and five kids aged three to six are packed into a car that seems as big as a boat. As a bonus we take a quick flight to Havana. My only memories of that side trip are of tall, dark haired women with skin the color of roasted peanuts striding past us in stiletto heels and pencil skirts. My mother and her friend wore neither. At the impressionable age of three I already knew people had different ways of living.
While in many ways this may seem to be just a random memory, it’s not. It’s a precursor to what will come decades later as my business partner, Lisa Travis, and I launch Pack-n-Go Girls. Our mission is this: We want to shrink the world. We want little girls to dream of going to far away places and not just to the mall. If they dream about it, they’re a lot more likely to pack their bags and go some day. And when they get out there, they’ll discover that even though we may have colorful differences across the globe, they’ll also discover that people are the same all over the world.