Blog Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway: The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar

The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar just released this week and I am thrilled to be a part of this blog tour and share with you all my excitement over this book! Check out what the author Adiba Jaigirdar has to say about their cover and be sure to enter one of two giveaways being hosted on this blog tour and on instagram for a copy of The Henna Wars!

The Henna Wars

by Adiba Jaigirdar
Published by: Page Street Kids
on May 12, 2020
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary
Bookshop, IndieBound, Audiobook through LibroFM, iTunes
Goodreads

When Dimple Met Rishi meets Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda in this rom com about two teen girls with rival henna businesses.

When Nishat comes out to her parents, they say she can be anyone she wants—as long as she isn’t herself. Because Muslim girls aren’t lesbians. Nishat doesn’t want to hide who she is, but she also doesn’t want to lose her relationship with her family. And her life only gets harder once a childhood friend walks back into her life.

Flávia is beautiful and charismatic and Nishat falls for her instantly. But when a school competition invites students to create their own businesses, both Flávia and Nishat choose to do henna, even though Flávia is appropriating Nishat’s culture. Amidst sabotage and school stress, their lives get more tangled—but Nishat can’t quite get rid of her crush on Flávia, and realizes there might be more to her than she realized.

Guest Post

How The Cover For The Henna Wars Came About!

After I signed the book deal for The Henna Wars, I couldn’t really picture a cover for it. I’m not very artistically gifted—or at all artistically gifted—so that probably shouldn’t be surprising. I had some vague ideas of things that might look nice on a cover, but nothing particularly solid. I just knew that I would really love it if my cover was all of the things that queer people of colour don’t often get in covers. That is, a cover featuring people of colour and that suggests a sapphic romance.

One of the first things my editors asked from me after we signed the book deal was some of my favourite book covers so that she could pass it on to the design team at Page Street. So, with the idea of wanting people of colour and wanting queerness on the cover, I sent her a few titles. Among them, were Sandhya Menon’s When Dimple Met Rishi, and Aminah Mae Safi’s Tell Me How You Really Feel, two books cover that I feel are so bold and proud of what the contents of the book feature.

A couple of months after that, my editor let me know that they had decided to hire an illustrator for my cover, and that if I had any suggestions I could send them onto her. I had never expected to have much—if any—input on the cover of my book, so I was super excited to be asked for a recommendation!

I immediately searched through a few artists that I knew of who were POC. I knew that I would love for this opportunity to go to a fellow POC, and that they would be the best equipped to illustrate the characters that I had written. I came up with a list of four different artists and send them to my editor. My publishing team loved the work of Nabigal-Nayagam Haider Ali, and we decided he would be the best person for the job!

I actually did not give any input about the design of the cover, but when I saw the concept art, I already knew that we had definitely chosen the right artist. He had done such a fantastic job of capturing the heart of the book, and the exact things that I knew I wanted on the cover. There were very few notes to give him before he produced the final cover that we have for the book now!

If you don’t already know Nabi’s work, he’s on Twitter, Instagram, he has a portfolio for his work, and a Patreon where you can support him. He is very talented and I feel so grateful for the beautiful cover that he has illustrated for The Henna Wars.

Giveaway

Win a copy of The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar (US/CAN only).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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