Intersected
--An animated show based on a series of books for younger readers, starring an Indian girl and her talking animal sidekicks, who have adventures throughout modern Britain and Europe meeting - and helping - dragons and other misunderstood mythic and magical beings as well as fighting ecological disaster, written by a feminist Asian lesbian author who's lived in Canada and the UK, to be explicitly countercultural -- no, this isn't a fantasy, though it is fantasy, I dowsed it up by quasi-coincidence, via delux_vivens to Oyate and the associated blog "American Indians in Children's Literature" by Debbie Reese, and from a comment on one of the reviews, to a revelatory post by Uma Krishnaswami in Vermont about the "Aditi" series which I'd never heard of until learning that it had been optioned for adaptation.
Here's an article about the series, and how the author wrote them for her niece in the UK, and for her niece's classmates who wanted more locations and adventures, and here's another roundup of the series, and here's a page about the author, Suniti Namjoshi, who has written other books of fantasy and poetry.
Has anyone here read them? Here is a British Scottish website which has them for sale - they don't seem to be available directly in the US, nor on Amazon. I don't can't say how good they are (as opposed to the goodness of the concept,) since I can't find any previews of the interior, but they seem to be popular among the target audience as well as adult reviewers, and sound somewhat similar to the "Magic Treehouse" books which have been such a long-running and popular series in the US for middle-school readers - it would be interesting to compare/contrast them, and it's too bad there doesn't seem to be any US distribution.
(--Of course if it was, our phobic Culture Warriors would likely spontaneously combust once they heard about it. Which would be extra win.)
ETA: aha! an article by Ms. Namjoshi on the project, and themes in her writing generally.
Here's an article about the series, and how the author wrote them for her niece in the UK, and for her niece's classmates who wanted more locations and adventures, and here's another roundup of the series, and here's a page about the author, Suniti Namjoshi, who has written other books of fantasy and poetry.
Has anyone here read them? Here is a British Scottish website which has them for sale - they don't seem to be available directly in the US, nor on Amazon. I don't can't say how good they are (as opposed to the goodness of the concept,) since I can't find any previews of the interior, but they seem to be popular among the target audience as well as adult reviewers, and sound somewhat similar to the "Magic Treehouse" books which have been such a long-running and popular series in the US for middle-school readers - it would be interesting to compare/contrast them, and it's too bad there doesn't seem to be any US distribution.
(--Of course if it was, our phobic Culture Warriors would likely spontaneously combust once they heard about it. Which would be extra win.)
ETA: aha! an article by Ms. Namjoshi on the project, and themes in her writing generally.