As a writer, reading is the most important thing that can be done to improve your craft. Provides a richer well from which to draw (try saying that five times fast). For a long time, I wasn’t reading. Nothing quite gripped me after I stopped reading Rick Riordan’s work religiously. (Funny how he has come up by name twice in a row.) I struggled to get through any long-form fiction until, ironically enough, Aru Shah and the End of Time. What broke me out? The decision to, as much as possible, stop reading fiction written by cisgender heterosexual white people. A choice that has upped my game significantly, both in terms of reading and writing. Even more so than Aru Shah, Zoraida Cordova’s Labyrinth Lost was the first book that I read in years that felt like the literature that made me care about writing and storytelling. It was adventurous, provocative, and inspiring in all of the ways that I want my YA to be. Labyrinth Lost follows Alejandra Mortiz, a teenager who hates magic
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is the thing that got me to start reading long-form fiction for the first time. I vividly remember being in the fifth grade, watching the Lightning Thief movie, and being so excited that the movie was based on the first book in a five-book series. ((Imagine the growing pain that I experienced the deeper I got and realized how violently the movie butchered the book.) With Riordan’s work being the biggest influence on my reading tastes, it only makes sense that one of the books that helped get me back onto the reading horse, so to speak, was from Rick Riordan Presents, an imprint he started that focuses on the mythologies of cultures that he, a white man, should probably (definitely) not be writing about. Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time was the first book I bought to get back into reading, and I’m glad I did, and have been even happier to revisit now. It follows Aru Shah, shocker, a twelve-year-old who lives in the Museu