“How about an art project?” I say.

Honey laughs, and I laugh.

And then, with our arms around each other, we go into the house.

Some years ago, I heard a British Filipino author speak about growing up in the Philippines and reading mostly UK and US exports. She’d come to the conclusion that Filipinos weren’t “allowed” in books. Hearing that sparked something in me I’d not thought about in quite that way until she’d said it. I realized that as a child growing up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish community in North America, I had internalized a similar sense of who and what belonged in books.

The closest I came to seeing something vaguely familiar to my observant Jewish home was in the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor, which takes place in the early 1900s, and as I got older, in the adult novels of Chaim Potok, set pre– and post–World War II. But mostly, the only religious Jews I saw were in the Holocaust books I read over and over again—about hidden children, ghetto children, their way of life decimated, their families murdered. Although I am the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, thankfully my life in 1980s Toronto could not have been more different. I strongly support the need for children’s Holocaust literature, and these books were a personal key to me understanding what my grandparents had gone through but never spoke about. At the same time, looking back, I see how hard it was to read over and over again about my people being victimized. Even today, the vast majority of mainstream books featuring religious Jews show them in the past, or as victims of persecution.

When I first started writing stories for children, the psychological impact of not seeing myself reflected back in literature revealed itself. In my first efforts, I copied the way other authors wrote: I sent my characters to regular public schools, not a Jewish day school; I had them dress up for Halloween, not Purim. In essence, I believed the world I knew best wasn’t legitimate enough to write about.

It wasn’t until I began to read my eldest child some of my own childhood favorites—Ballet Shoes, Anne of Green Gables, tons of Judy Blume, all the Ramona books, and All-of-a-Kind Family—as well as some new ones I was just discovering, like The Penderwicks, that I felt a shift inside me. I wondered if I could do what these writers all do so beautifully—show the importance and magnitude of small dramas in everyday life—but with contemporary Jewish characters.

That was when I began to write Honey and Me. While the story is about a world I come from and know well, it is not about me. Even Milla and Honey’s peeling-an-orange speeches—which friends I grew up with will recognize as the topic I chose for our sixth-grade speech contest (a topic I myself borrowed from my older neighbor, and for which I even won second place)—were not my speech (at least I don’t think so, I can’t remember it at all!). But like Milla, it was the first time I felt like my creative interior world might be something interesting, even appreciated, in the outside world. When my fingers first typed a conversation between Honey and Milla, I not only felt them come alive on the page, I suddenly understood that you don’t have to turn your back on who you are and where you come from in order to do something legitimate. Who you are—which includes your interior self and the external world you come from—can give you something very rich to share.