Book Cover: The Royal Abduls

I've been having fun working on the book cover for Ramiza Shamoun Koya's upcoming book The Royal Abduls, due out in spring, 2020, by Forest Avenue Press. Here's the description from the publisher:

Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel weaves together the lives of an evolutionary biologist and her eleven-year-old nephew, who is struggling with his cultural identity in post 9/11 Washington, D.C. Omar’s mother is white, and his first-generation American father never wants to talk about India. Or what it means to be Muslim, especially after what happened with the planes. When Amina leaves the West Coast for a D.C. lab job studying hybrid zones, Omar’s parents begin relying on her for childcare. Amina finds her nephew curious and lonely. Despite the demands of her male-dominated workplace and her preference for solitude, she befriends Omar and begins to form a clearer picture of her brother’s seemingly perfect life. Amina’s hesitant romance with a Sikh cricket coach and bookstore owner blossoms as Omar’s parents’ marriage fractures. THE ROYAL ABDULS, a family drama about the lives of secular Muslims post-9/11, engages with the struggles of women in the workplace, the difficulties of maintaining relationships in a fragmented America, and what it means to truly be yourself.

One of the main threads of the story is that eleven-year-old Omar creates a fantasy in which he's descended from Indian royalty. While trying to trace his family tree and learn all about the country of his father's people, Omar tries in every way he can to own some piece of his Indian heritage, royal or not, even affecting an Indian accent at school.

Thinking about Omar's beloved fantasy, I pictured two cityscapes, one right-side up and one upside down, one American, one Indian.

I started by building some elements. Townhouses, trees, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, all to represent the American half.

For India, I started with the Taj Mahal. The definitive Indian structure. In learning about the country, Omar would surely have discovered and wondered over the exotic beauty of its huge dome and flanking minarets

Then I found out where Omar's ancestors hailed from: a city called Hyderabad. The major landmark in Hyderabad is a monument and mosque called Charminar.

So I knew that needed to go in there too.

Most of the work I did in creating the cover for The Royal Abduls was in moving around my elements, adding and discarding them, choosing just which should be included and how their arrangement would look best on the page.

One thing I like to do in my process is overdo things and then have to go back and simplify. I loved the detail of illuminated windows in my buildings, but putting them all together in a design was just too busy. So for the India half, the detailed silhouettes became straight silhouettes. For the America half, having one window stand out evoked a sense of intimacy that I liked. I did a lot of tinkering.

Simple got even simpler. I shared samples and consulted with publisher Laura Stanfill and author Ramiza Shamoun Koya, and as we narrowed things down, the landmarks of Washington DC got left at the wayside in favor of a simple line of townhouses representing home.

Laura thought the element of the moon felt unnecessary, so it went away. I tried a bit of a border, but we discarded that too. I played with some fancier lettering, but in the end we went with simple again, afraid that fancy might blur into exotic, which can easily slide into cultural appropriation like the Asian-flavored lettering on a Chinese takeout box.

What I think all of us wanted was a simple design that would allow the eye to focus on the geographic information of America/India and for the mind to pick up on the hand-in-hand themes of longing and home.

The Royal Abduls will be out in May of 2020. More information is here.

Here's an excerpt.

A couple of weeks later, Amina arrived at Omar’s private school a few minutes early for her presentation. She stood at the door in the back of the classroom, pushing her hair off the hot back of her neck while the teacher finished her lesson on democratic principles. Amina had first put on jeans, then traded them for khakis, but they were too loose to look actually professional, and she had already sweated through her button-up.

The school was a fairly exclusive one, the opposite of the scruffy public schools she and Omar’s father had attended. Omar’s classroom was bright and neat and new, and the students sat in groups rather than rows.

“Who exactly gets to vote in a democracy?” the teacher asked. Omar raised his hand from a front table, his eyes bigger than ever, his chin raised in eagerness. To Amina’s astonishment, he answered using a heavily applied Indian accent.

“It is depending,” he began, “on which period in history we are speaking of.”

Amina peered at him. He was second generation, born in America with a white mother and a father who had never spoken with an ethnic inflection in his life. Omar was speaking like his grandparents, like Amina’s parents, like a real, bona fide, not raised in the States or maybe even just recently arrived, Indian. Actually, it seemed a little exaggerated, like Apu from The Simpsons.