Fatima Tate Takes the Cake author Khadijah VanBrakle follows up her debut in her new contemporary YA novel My Perfect Family. Sixteen-year-old Leena Stewart’s life with her single mother, Asiyah, is all she knows, until Leena learns that her grandfather, Tariq—from whom Asiyah has been estranged since her pregnancy with Leena at 16—has been hospitalized. Leena eagerly connects with Tariq, and, upon his discharge, visits him in his affluent Muslim community. Tariq provides Leena with things she’s always wanted, including expensive gifts, but her mother, recalling her own tumultuous childhood, warns Leena against trusting him. VanBrakle spoke with PW about Black American Muslim intersectionality and how her experience as a mother influences her approach to children’s books.
Did watching your children navigate Black Muslim identity inform how you developed Leena’s perspective?
Let me start with a little anecdote. Since Fatima Tate Takes the Cake was my debut, I didn’t know what to expect. I learned very early on not to read reviews. That said, I have a very close friend who would look on Goodreads, and if she saw five-star reviews, she would copy and paste them and send them to me. But I know that there were a lot of people who one-starred Fatima Tate because the main character’s female best friend has a girlfriend, and those readers were questioning my relationship with my faith because of that.
My home is a very open household. I’ve had my children ask me questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer, which I think is just a part of parenting. My youngest daughter came home from an inclusion club meeting at her school, and she said, “Mommy, I went to this club meeting and there were all these different kinds of people. One of the members said they identified as LGBTQ. They were really nice to me. What should I do?” And I said, “Okay, let’s have a conversation. They’re being nice to you, and they’re not bullying you. They’re not making fun of your name or your headscarf. Be nice back.”
I wanted to bring that openness into Leena’s relationship with her mother in My Perfect Family because I know from firsthand experience that not every household in the Muslim faith community—at least, the households that I’m aware of—is like that.
How did you balance portraying Leena’s journey toward making decisions about her relationships and faith with her mother’s own teenage experience with similar challenges?
I wanted to make sure that even though Leena’s mother had this secret history—which I, of course, knew about, but Leena didn’t—that their dynamic started out as a very open relationship, at least on the surface. I wanted Asiyah to parent differently than how she was raised. Then when Leena learns that her mother has been keeping some deeply held family secrets from her, to Leena, it would be like, “This is totally against how you raised me.”
What were some key aspects you wanted to highlight through Leena’s intergenerational bonds with her mother, her grandfather, and her great-aunt?
I wanted to show through Leena’s relationship with Tariq that, because he hasn’t been in his daughter’s life for almost two decades, he’s definitely mellowed from when Asiyah was a teenager. I wanted to make the person Leena develops a relationship with to be calm and reasonable, because the most important thing to him now is forming this relationship with Leena.
Whereas Leena’s great-aunt Samira is still very rigid. And now Leena gets to see for herself through some of the conversations she has with Samira that her great-aunt still blames Asiyah for how their relationship turned out. I wanted all of those things to be front and center, and I wanted Leena to discover them for herself, because it’s one thing for her mother to tell her about Tariq and Samira, but when Leena experiences it, she’s gets to make her own decisions and she also gets to experience a little bit of what she imagines her mother went through as a teenager.
Tariq leads a more financially comfortable life than Leena and her mother do. Why was it important for you to include this additional complicating dynamic?
I wanted to show that anybody can be going through this, that everybody is dealing with different financial means. This is not something that’s talked about in my faith community. We might address other important issues like racism but when it comes time to talk about financial disparities, it is definitely something that’s swept under the rug.
What were some things you experienced while developing your debut that helped you tackle My Perfect Family?
Because Fatima Tate Takes the Cake was my first book, there was no deadline for me to finish by. I got to write it for fun, but I also got to learn about my writing process. That was one of the most important pieces of advice that seasoned writers told me: learn the process. I know I hate drafting. I hate it with a passion, but I have a story to tell, so I learned to buckle down.
Whenever I start on a new project, I reread Story Genius by Lisa Cron, and I make sure that I’ve done all the things that Cron highlights: what’s the character’s name? What’s her address, birth date, favorite things, temperament, all these things. This method suits how my brain works because I’m very analytical. I need to know my character inside and out, things like the kind of vernacular I want her to use so that if somebody suggests a word change to me, I can know for sure, “No, she would never say that.”
I also learned that I have to micromanage myself down to the minute, and that I have to bribe myself. Every single day I said, “This is how much I have to get done. If I get it done, I get a reward.”
What motivates you to continue writing?
When adults ask, “Why did you start writing?” I tell them it’s because, in 2017, I learned that there wasn’t a single traditionally published book in contemporary young adult that had a Black American Muslim main character. I had been at the library with my family and one of my daughters wanted to read about herself. There was nothing. So I took it as a challenge.
What’s next for you?
I’ll give you a typical Muslim answer: Inshallah. I have a lot of stories to tell, and nobody’s stopping me.
My Perfect Family by Khadijah VanBrakle. Holiday House, $19.99 Aug. 26 ISBN 978-0-8234-5486-0
