Which is even worse than working for her mother’s new cleaning business.

But she kinda, sorta stole $287.22 from her college fund that she’s got to pay back ASAP or her mom will ground her for life. Rachel can’t believe she has to give up her Saturdays to scrubbing other people’s toilets. Ultimately, though, I felt like it would be worse to ignore her true identity than to not try writing it at all.Ĭleaning up after the in-crowd gets Rachel all the best dirt. And it’s precisely that fear that kept me from acknowledging her ethnicity in early drafts of the book. Have I made any missteps in depicting a biracial character? Perhaps. Not only do I know a thing or two about teen mortification, but having been raised bicultural made it easier for me to imagine how Rachel might feel about being biracial. I realized that my personal experiences did play a part in shaping her character. So I set out to write Rachel not as a biracial character but as a real character, one whose desires and emotions I could tap into and understand. And second, I realized that none of the other characters I had written were “like me.” If I stuck to the “like me” criteria then I could only write about characters who had lived in Poland until they were five and then moved to New England. It didn’t guide the story it just felt like a natural part of her character. First, why couldn’t Rachel’s race be part of her character without it affecting the plot? Rachel being biracial was just as much a part of her as being a girl or an only child. Also, did I, a Polish-born, American-raised author have a right to write about a character who wasn’t like me?Īs I mulled this over, I came to two realizations. It didn’t play a large part in the story, but it was part of her character. Or perhaps Rachel appeared in my head that way just because that’s who she is.įor several drafts of the novel, however, I struggled with how overt I should make Rachel’s ethnicity. Perhaps this character detail emerged because the story took place in middle school, a time in my own life that I associate with one of my closest friends (then and now) who is Korean. When I first began writing The Dirt Diary a few years ago, I knew early on that the main character, Rachel, had a white mom and a Korean-American dad. I was very pleased to receive an ARC of this fabulous book and shared my thoughts on it in my 5-star Goodreads review. Welcome, Anna! Let’s give a big welcome to returning guest blogger Anna Staniszewski, author of the upcoming tween book The Dirt Diary, as she discusses creating a diverse main character.

The dirt diary series