Why write a diverse cast of characters in Medieval France?

The first reason is love

I’m deeply thankful for the chance to tell this particular princess story and to let it live and breathe in the body of a woman with a different skin color from mine. It’s a mark of respect and love. I love my friends and family who are all shades of brown, and I’m thankful. I’m also blessed to have had mentors and teachers who are diverse. Yet I see that lacking too often in mainstream books and TV. I hope that my LatinX son and all his friends will grow up seeing people of all shades represented in those universal hero characters.

The second reason is honesty

The Middle Ages were diverse! Documented evidence shows BIPOC people throughout Medieval Europe in noble classes, knightly service and common working classes….

The third reason is justice

An honest, healthy and beautiful world is a diverse world….

To suffer is to be human. To suffer and to be invalidated in that suffering is to be Black in America today.

As a writer, I’m obsessed with theories of trauma recovery. I believe that the world contains a whole lot of unhealed trauma and that by understanding and working through the established stages of trauma healing, some of that trauma can be stopped, healed and even reversed…

Here are three trauma-healing steps:

1. Stop the trauma.

2. Tell the whole story of the trauma, in detail, to a witness who gives full validation:
- It happened.
- It was awful.

3. Allow the trauma survivor time and space to re-narrate the story, emphasizing resilience and ultimately restoring the full force of the creative imagination.

I learned about this path to healing while trying to recover from my own experiences of trauma. There were things I couldn’t talk about, had told no one. I knew I was living a kind of half-life, avoiding certain topics or fleeing job opportunities that triggered memories of my trauma…

There’s one response I hear from a lot of people who read Tower of Sand:

Oh my! This is not a typical young adult novel…

That is because none of my friends fit the typical young adult novel formula.

My friends look gorgeous, and they are achievers. From the outside, to some, they might seem like standard female protagonists. But they have also weathered some crazy hardships.

One escaped war and attempted imprisonment by a corrupt government. One got married as a second wife to a man who was already married. One was trafficked, another forcibly separated from their children and another raped by a person she loved and trusted. I have other friends who have been devalued, denied work, underpaid or blocked from websites because of their gender, creed, color of skin, fashion taste or breast size. I only know of one friend who married at that classic fairytale age of 16, and though she loved the dude, and though she made that choice, her narrative also involved hardship…