Sophomore Arya Bansal was incredibly bored during quarantine, but found that it gave her the inspiration she needed to write and self-publish, with her sister, Tara Bansal, as a co-illustrator, Roar.

“I started writing a little after school closed due to the virus,” said Arya. “I decided I wanted to write a book towards the beginning because I wanted to do something with my time and create something good for society.”

Arya’s book is about a lioness named Shakti who lives in a pride where lionesses are not allowed to roar, symbolic of the longtime oppression of women. One day, after all the male lions go away on a trip, an evil lion enters the lioness kingdom. Shakti is torn between roaring in order to save her cub and sticking to previous societal traditions. Roar captures how Shakti moves beyond the society’s traditions and proves her own strength and capabilities by changing the lion society. 

After realizing she wanted to tell a story about the important issue of women’s equality, Arya began to wonder how she could portray it in a children’s book and simplify it for a younger audience. 

“I wanted to make a book about a lion society because lions are regarded as very powerful animals and seen as kings and queens of the jungles. Also, I liked the concept of a roar and how I could use it as a symbol for finding and using your voice to influence society,” Arya said.

Arya sought help from her sister, a student in the seventh grade at Cooper Middle School to create drawings to accompany her story, which they completed together on an iPad. She recounted that “It was a little unexpected how long it took just to write a children’s book and how many times it took to revise, but on the positive side, I was really surprised by how easy and relatively inexpensive it was to self-publish a book on Amazon and then let my family and friends spread the word get it out to the community.”

Arya described her desire to encourage female empowerment. “In the past, it’s been something I really like to fight for; I actually went to the Women’s March, which was awesome, so I think it’s really cool to write a book about such an important issue.”

Roar is available to purchase on Amazon. So far, Arya has raised about $800, and all proceeds are donated to the Children’s Defense Fund. Arya is also currently working on another book with her drawing and design class, focused around the Black Lives Matter movement, which she hopes to publish in the coming months.