Damselfly
For today’s famous Friday we are featuring Damselfly, a scholastic young adult novel which features a multiracial narrator. Damselfly arrived on March 27, 2018. The author, Chandra Prasad, is half-Asian/half-Caucasian-with some Indian plus Swedish, English, and Italian. She has been committed to multiracial awareness for a long time. This is evidenced by her having originated, edited, and contributed to Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2006 and is still used in classrooms today (Mat Johnson, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, and Ruth Ozeki are among the contributors).
Since Chandra has transitioned into young adult fiction she has made it a point to create multiracial characters in her books because she felt there were almost none in the books she read while growing up. Her next novel will feature a multiracial protagonist. Multiracialism is also a subject Chandra Prasad brings up with the media to draw greater awareness to the exploding, but still misunderstood and misrepresented, population. Damselfly is a modern-day riff on Lord of the Flies, but with an American cast and a focus on gender, race, and class. The storyline is completely original. The book is already becoming popular in middle school, high school, and college classrooms. Teachers are pairing it with the Lord of the Flies, the classic by William Golding, as a “parallel read” or “companion novel.” Check out DAMSELFLY. www.chandraprasad.com
Damselfly Book video Trailer