Photo: Supplied: Bateman Books
A Samoan-Chinese-Pākēhā author says his new fantasy book provides a type of character he didn’t have as a 10-year-old in love with reading.
Kenneth Chapman said growing up, he loved series like Harry Potter, Lemony Snickets, and His Dark Materials but those fantasy worlds were different to the mixed-race Polynesian family he came from.
Lonasei and the Mystery of Origin Grove is about an 11-year old and her older sister who move into their mother’s childhood home – a mansion full of mysterious paintings created by their estranged aunt.
He said it places a Polynesian character in a fantasy world.
“When you’re a 10-year-old kid and you’re in love with reading, you’re not really – or at least I wasn’t – thinking about representation and relatability on that kind of cultural level,” Chapman told Nine to Noon.
“But it was more as an adult thinking back and going, it never even occurred to me that there would be a Polynesian character in a book like the ones that I was reading, and then even further to that, there definitely wouldn’t be a mixed-race Polynesian kid.
“For me, it’s not a massive cultural emphasis; rather … just an idea of just pure representation at a base level, of just that these kinds of people can exist in a world where people have special abilities and things like that.”
The character Lonasei is “very much” based on him, a mixed-race person growing up in New Zealand, Chapman said.
“That was kind of the core inspiration behind [it] – giving the 10-year-old version of me now can read it, and they can have a relationship with literature that there isn’t this love but disconnect at the same time.”
Chapman said the endorsement of his story by his former Girl Guides’ group gave him confidence to start submitting to publishers.
He first told it to two sisters he used to nanny for, and later tested it by telling it to his Girl Guides group.
“One of them said, after I finished it, she said, ‘if that was a book, I’d read it over and over again’.
“So I promised them, well I’ll go away and I’ll write it as a book, and then I’ll give it to you.
“I wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and then I spent a frustrating amount of money to print – privately printed – bound copies of this book, just so that every girl in the unit could have their own, because I promised that to them.
“And their response to that was so overwhelmingly positive, and parents messaging me and calling me about how much their kid loved this book, and they wanted another, they wanted a sequel. That gave me a lot of confidence to start submitting to publishers.”
Chapman is also a teacher and a filmmaker, and said teaching gives him an insight into character creation.
“So, when I go to say write a 15-year-old or write a 13-year-old, I’m not being theoretical, I’m hearing the way that they speak, their mannerisms, I’m seeing the kind of behaviours and what they’re interested in, and having conversation with people these ages every single day.”
It’s also not the first book he’s written.
“I had written about seven novels before this one got signed, and they were all different genres. A couple were more for high school age students, and then one is like an adult tragic romance. Others were more like literary fiction, and then I had another middle-grade drama, and so I’m excited to kind of rework some of those. One is a zombie apocalypse Gossip Girl-type drama that’s scheduled to re-release next year.”
He said Lonasei’s story may also yet continue.
“I’ve already written the second manuscript, so we’ll just see how the first one sells, and hopefully I get the opportunity to keep telling her stories.”
