The world of pediatric oncology is one of extremes. The diseases strike unexpectedly, cruelly, and without discernible cause in the midst of childhood, a time of remarkable growth and innocence. While these diseases were once a death sentence, the improvements in survival rates (in places where the latest treatments are available) have been dramatic: five-year survival rates of near 90% compared to 10% just forty years ago. Even so, the burdens of disease and treatments are high, and of course, death still comes too often. Among the tribulations of the pediatric cancers, beauty can be found in the lives and loves of the children and families. One aspect of beauty is the compassionate connections that can develop between the children affected. In The Moon Prince and the Sea, Dr. Daniela Anderson captures this beauty in both words and pictures as she tells a fantasy story based on actual patients.

Sumit is a boy in rural India who travels for days to get to the hospital for treatments for an undefined serious illness. As he physically recovers, he connects with other children in the hospital. He also learns of a girl named Marina in a distant country (the US) who has cancer as evidenced by her bald head and connection to an IV pole. He is touched by her story and dreams of her. He paints her a picture with two moons—one on earth and one in the sky—and sends the picture and a brief letter of encouragement to Marina. Far away, she receives his gifts and feels both connection and comfort.

After he returns to his country home from the city hospital, Sumit is not able to return for more treatments because of the family’s lack of resources. A caring nurse travels to Sumit’s home to find him with hopes of continuing his treatment. The neighbor children, however, inform her that Sumit is now “in God’s home.” But in Anderson’s imagining, the story has not ended and Sumit’s connection to Marina continues.

Back in her hospital, Marina waits until family and friends are ready, and then she closes her eyes and takes her last breath. In the next place, she and Sumit are united, healed, unafraid, and bound together.

Anderson’s watercolor illustrations are rich and vibrant, and they evoke feelings of comfort and compassion. Sumit has a yellow silk cape that both connects him to the moon and presents him with a certain regal dignity and resilience. His cape and bearing mark him as “the moon prince,” while Marina’s name means “the sea,” and thus the book’s title. While Marina is surrounded by family and the best of medical care and resources, there is a sense of vulnerability as her disease puts her beyond all efforts of cure. Understandably frightened, she has a quiet strength as she waits to take her last breath until her family is ready. Hand in hand, Sumit and Marina then travel on together, connected to the mystery of the unknown while rooted in the known, which is love.

Children with cancer and other serious diseases are, of course, like the rest of us—not always saints, not always wise and inspirational. Yet there is something striking about the experience of a life-threatening illness at a time of life wired for dramatically persistent growth. Such children often have and show stubborn resilience and focus their time and attentions more on the prospects of living rather than dying. And if death comes, it is not uncommon that they demonstrate deep compassion for their family and their fellow patients—others who suffer. Anderson captures these aspects of children and illness in the story, which treats death as both ending and beginning. There is real sadness, of course, in the story because it is faithful to the truths of terminal childhood illness. Nevertheless, the strongest feelings and impressions are connection, compassion, and transcendence, and these are other real truths at the intersection of the worlds of childhood and illness. — Greg Adams

Greg Adams, LCSW, ACSW, FT is Program Coordinator for the Center for Good Mourning and Staff Bereavement Support at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. His work of 27 years at Arkansas Children’s Hospital includes time in pediatric oncology, pediatric palliative care, and grief support for staff and community adults, adolescents and children. He also writes and edits a grief/loss electronic newsletter, The Mourning News. Other current related experiences include teaching an annual grief/loss elective class in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work and chairing the Credentialing Council for the Association of Death Education and Counseling.

"The Serpent's Secret" is the first book in the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond Series; Scholastic publishes the book on February 27, 2018.

“Stories are the way we human beings shape our worlds,” writes Sayantani DasGupta, MD MPH, in the article “Stories Matter: Narrative, Health and Social Justice.” In the piece, the author, educator and Intima contributor (Spring 2016 issue), elaborates on the ways that narrative is shaped by many factors, from the personal to the political. Narrative, she posits, can be life-changing: “In the face of illness or adversity, injustice or trauma, stories help bridge what theorist Arthur Frank has called ‘narrative wreckage’—the point at which one’s old life’s plot is no longer valid, and one needs a new plot with which to continue life’s journey.”

These words have a particular resonance right now in light of the #metoo movement, where long-silenced voices are being heard in narratives that support finding ways to balance sexual inequality. Curiously enough, the words are equally significant as a way to read “The Serpent’s Secret,” a remarkable and delightful new work of children’s fiction by Dr. DasGupta, just published by Scholastic as Book 1 of the new series Kiranmala and The Kingdom Beyond. How refreshing to find an electrifying social theorist like Dr. DasGupta who is also an entertaining prose stylist able to deliver an empowering novel for tweens. It’s a book that is multi-generational in the way the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series were—"The Serpent's Secret" also speaks to readers who finished middle school many red moons ago.

The book begins on the morning of New Jersey kid Kiranmala’s birthday, who in her own sassy voice introduces her story about a day when everything in her world radically changes:

The day my parents got swallowed by a rakkhosh and whisked away to another galactic dimension was a pretty crap-tastic day. The fact that it was actually my twelfth birthday made it all that much worse. Instead of cake or presents or a party, I spent the day kicking demon butt, traveling through time and space looking for my family, and basically saving New Jersey, our entire world, and everything beyond it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll tell you that part soon. First, let me back up a little.

As readers we are engaged by this smart, empowered narrator, who is alone, newly orphaned, yet tough—she already sounds like Ripley of Alien, one of the original female butt kickers in 1979 when the sci-fi thriller came out. We’re intrigued by words we do not know (what the heck is a ‘rakkhosh’?) and are drawn in by the promise of time travel and life-challenging adventures in other galaxies. In her own knowing way, young Kiranmala has given us the big-picture plot in the first paragraph, enticing us to come along with her to see what transpires.

Like many of the best books in children’s fiction, parents are dispensed with from the get go, here swallowed by a rakkosh—a “carnivorous, snot-trailing demon” who populates many of the Bengali folktales Dr. DasGupta was told as a child. In the first chapters, Kiranmala’s childhood home is also trashed by the demon with a black tongue who she calls “halitosis head.” That’s the overall dynamic and tone the author sets up: sword fighting amid the silliness, cleverness cancelling out the fearful chaos.

“The Serpent’s Secret” is aimed at young people who are at an age where childhood and adulthood begin to overlap, where the power of parents is displaced by the power of peers. Dr. DasGupta, a pediatrician and a mother, knows only too well the rough road of this developmental stage, when the plot of childhood branches off into new paths toward adulthood, and as a skillful writer, she’s able to bring to life the joys, confusion, real terror and pure happiness that emotional journey often takes in intriguing and amusing—not heavy-handed—ways. We are inside the young narrator’s head, seeing and judging events from her no-nonsense point of view. Her voice is compelling.

In Kiranmala’s quest to save her parents, she meets up with a cast of eccentric characters as amusing, complex and memorable as the flying monkeys, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Good Witch and Bad Witch that Dorothy encounters in “The Wizard of Oz.” There’s Lal and Neel, two brother princes on winged horses who battle zombies and escort Kiranmala from Parsippany to the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers in search of her parents. There’s the magical pun-loving bird, Tuntani, whose corny jokes provide lighthearted moments and reflect the goofiness (“How do chickens get strong? Egg-ersize!”) tweens and teens love. There’s the intimidating green-eyed Sesha, the Serpent King, “guardian of the primordial ocean of divine nectar, keeper of time” and many others, each one an encounter for Kiranmala to confront and conquer to get to her goal.

Throughout the story, Kiranmala discovers dramatic truths about her origins as well as several revelations about life. There is the conflict between dark and light, a familiar theme in children’s and YA fiction from Grimms’ Fairy Tales to “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and “Twilight.” In “The Serpent’s Secret,” Kiranmala learns the difference between dark energy and dark matter, passes through tides of rubies in a peacock barge that reroutes her to the Demon Land (aka "The Blood-Thirsty State,") and battles a room of pythons to steal a jewel needed to read a shape-shifting map that will guide her to her parents. Those are just a few of the startling and original moments that keep the narrative taut and surprising throughout the novel’s 338 fast-paced pages.

Sayantani DasGupta, the daughter of Indian immigrants, wanted to share her love of books with her own kids but was saddened by the lack of heroes that looked like her family and neighbors. She decided to write her own stories, returning to the folkt… — Sayantani DasGupta, the daughter of Indian immigrants, wanted to share her love of books with her own kids but was saddened by the lack of heroes that looked like her family and neighbors. She decided to write her own stories, returning to the folktales she heard on childhood trips to India.
Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, Dr. DasGupta is also the author, co-author or co-editor of several books, including a book of Bengali folktales, *The Demon Slayers and Other Stories* (Interlink 1995), and the recent *Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine* (Oxford 2016). She teaches in the Master's Program in Narrative Medicine, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, Dr. DasGupta goes into detail about the Bengali folktales that inspired many of the characters in “The Serpent’s Secret.” It’s a short and welcome postscript that underscores one of the reasons the author decided to write children’s fiction. As the daughter of Indian immigrants, she wanted to share her love of books with her own kids but was surprised by the lack of diversity in the books available. She decided to write her own stories, returning to the folktales filled with bloodthirsty demons and enchanted animals that she heard on childhood trips to India. Cue applause for that decision: In the first book in the Kiranmala and The Kingdom Beyond series, Sayantani DasGupta has created lovable characters, a rollicking narrative and meaningful themes that have a broad appeal for many young (and not-so-young) readers, setting up a thirst for what's up next for the appealing young heroine.

New fans of Princess Kiranmala will undoubtedly be clamoring and drooling like rakkhoshs for Books 2 and 3.—Donna Bulseco

DONNA BULSECO, MA, MS, is a graduate of the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. After getting her BA at UCLA in creative writing and American poetry, the L.A. native studied English literature at Brown University for a Master's degree, then moved to New York City. She has been an editor and journalist for the past 25 years at publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Women's Wear Daily, W, Self, and InStyle, and has written articles for Health, More and The New York Times. She is Managing Editor of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.