In the 1990s, when her kids were young and her dream of being a children’s author was still just that — a dream — Shirin Shamsi wrote a picture book about a teddy bear who got lost during the holy month of Ramadan.
A publisher rejected the manuscript, but the story didn’t end there.
Shamsi, a suburban mom who wanted Muslim kids to have culturally relevant books, kept plugging away: taking classes, attending conferences, honing her craft.
And 25 years later, all that hard work has paid off.
Shamsi’s teddy bear book, rewritten with the bear in a supporting role and titled “Zahra’s Blessing: A Ramadan Story,” is being published by Barefoot Books. Kirkus Reviews called it engaging and sweet.
Another children’s book by Shamsi, “The Moon From Dehradun: A Story of Partition,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in August.
“I feel like I’m doing the best thing in the world — writing for children,” said Shamsi, who lives in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. “It’s the only thing I want to do.”
Shamsi, whose parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Pakistan in the 1950s, grew up in England. She was an avid reader and enthusiastic writer. At age 7 or 8, she recalled, she would fill up her diary page for the week — and then tape in extra paper so she could write more.
Later, when she was raising her own children in the Chicago suburbs, she saw an ad in a magazine with the tagline, “Do you want to be a children’s writer?”
“You know what?” Shamsi said to her husband, Talha, a physical therapist. “This is my dream.”
He told her to go for it.
“It was such a simple thing, but it changed the trajectory of my life,” she said. At first, her audience was her own three children, who are now in their 30s. She wanted them to see stories that represented their cultural heritage and faith tradition, she said.
The teddy bear story, her first Ramadan tale, was part of that. In school, there were Christmas stories and Hanukkah stories, she said, and she felt her kids needed a holiday book of their own.
In the initial version of the story, the brave bear ended up at a thrift store during Ramadan and overcame numerous obstacles on his way to being reunited with Zahra.
A publisher rejected the book in 2002, but Shamsi continued to read it to her kids, and she brought it with her when she volunteered to read her works — laminated but still unpublished — to grade school classes. When her youngest child started college, she became a community bookseller for Barefoot Books, which has a catalog of inclusive children’s literature she greatly admired.
She returned to the teddy bear manuscript in about 2016 and decided the book would be more relatable if the main character was a child. She wanted to tell a layered story, Shamsi said. She wanted to contain the narrative within the month of Ramadan. News stories of refugees had made a strong impression on her around that time as well, and she wanted to include a refugee in the story.
In 2019, she decided to participate in a Twitter pitch party, in which authors pitch summaries of their stories to publishers, and Barefoot Books expressed interest.
The publisher helped with edits designed to give the refugee character a bigger voice in the story. In the final version, a girl named Zahra hopes that Ramadan will bring her a much longed-for little sister. Zahra loses her teddy bear in the course of helping her mother donate clothing, and makes friends with a little girl named Haleema, who has made it to the U.S. without her parents and is living at a refugee center.
The good news kept coming for Shamsi when her publisher found an illustrator for the book: Manal Mirza of Chicago’s North Shore.
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Unbeknownst to the publisher, the two women had met when Mirza was about 7. Her teacher at a North Shore private school, Dawne Salier, was a friend of Shamsi’s, and Shamsi used to volunteer to read her books in Salier’s classes.
Mirza, who loved drawing and coloring as a child, remembered Shamsi well.
“I felt like that was the first time it clicked for me: ‘Oh, someone actually draws and writes these books.’ That’s when the connection was made,” said Mirza, an illustrator and a user interface designer for an app.
Shamsi also remembered Mirza, and she was touched to discover the little girl she had read to as a child had become an artist.
“We think that we have things in our hands. We hope for the best, but everything has a ripple effect,” she said. “You go out there and you read to a child, but you don’t realize the power of stories.”