by Courtney Pippin-Mathur

First off, thank you to Tara for hosting my cover reveal on her blog!

HAPPY DIWALI is my most personal book, yet it has been a first for me in a lot of ways.

It will be my third picture book, but it is the first one that I wrote with someone else. The story is about a small girl celebrating Diwali with her family and how she overcomes her initial shyness. It was inspired by my daughter Kiran, and her love of family celebrations but her nervousness of large groups of people.

Diwali is the Hindu celebration of good over evil, light over darkness. This book follows how my sister-in-law Sanyukta brings the joys of Diwali to our culturally- and racially-mixed family in the US.  Sanyukta has been involved every step, from writing the first draft (on the phone) to revisions, cultural notes, tips on how to draw a sari, or what should be on the endpapers. When we couldn’t meet in person, we would meet on Zoom. It has been an amazing experience to create a book with her! The photo below is our author photo in the book. It is from long ago but is our favorite picture together.

It is the first book in which every character except one (the main character) is an actual member of our family. I emailed or messaged each parent and asked for photos and tried to include every child in the family. Some might resemble the actual child more than others, and I did age down most of them, but it was a lot of fun!

Here you can see my daughter in her favorite lehenga, and how I drew it in the book.

Below is one of my favorite images from the book. In in, the kids are painting diyas. Every year Sanyukta creates a craft, my favorite is painting clay diyas because I can re-use them every year.

It is the first book where the (amazing) editor who acquired the book moved to a new publishing house during the illustration process. Thankfully, the book was left to another wonderful editor. The publisher and art director also moved to new publishing houses, but we were very lucky in that our new editor kept everything chugging along.

It is also the first book I worked on during the pandemic. It took me a few months after Covid first hit the US and everything shut down before I could draw again. Thankfully I had been allocated plenty of time.

Because it had been so long since I have seen many members of the family in the book, I keenly felt the loss of family gatherings as I worked and really look forward to them again soon.

I hope this book can be a thank you from me to my husband’s family for making me feel so welcome in their homes and for always including me in and teaching me about their traditions and culture.

The designer pulled an image from the interior of the book to make the cover.

Here is the color sketch:

And here’s the final cover!

On the front is my sister-in-law Sanyukta and her daughter Priya drawing rangoli. They do that every year to welcome the guests. On the back cover is a group image of the kids eating, which is one of my favorite things to do at Diwali!

Courtney, thank you for sharing this beautiful book and your family traditions.

HAPPY DIWALI will be released September 28, 2021 and is available for pre-order now.

Blog readers, you can win an original sketch of a character (Rajini) from Courtney’s book!

Just leave one comment below to enter and a random winner will be selected soon!

Good luck!

Sanyukta Mathur is a social scientist and studies how to improve the health and well-being of young people around the world. She is the author of various research publications; HAPPY DIWALI! is her first children’s book. She lives in Maryland with her family. 

Courtney Pippin-Mathur is the author-illustrator of MAYA WAS GRUMPY and DRAGONS RULE, PRINCESSES DROOL!. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband, three kids and one very energetic dog. She is hugely grateful to be part of a diverse and welcoming family who work hard to bring their traditions to the United States and to pass them to new generations. You can find more of her work at pippinmathur.com or on Instagram @pippinmathur.