We are delighted to welcome Rashmi Sirdeshpande to the blog.  Rashmi's first book How to Be Extraordinary was published in 2019 and featured the real-life stories of fifteen inspiring individuals.  Rashmi's new picture book, Never Show a T-Rex a Book! publishes this August, has bold and brilliant illustrations by Diane Ewen and is a witty, wise and warm story about books, libraries, reading and of course - dinosaurs!  

Never Show a T-Rex a Book may be a super silly adventure about books and the power of the imagination but at its heart it’s also a love letter to libraries. Even my dedication is to librarians. Because libraries made me. My parents’ story is a classic immigrant story. They came to this country with next to nothing. They didn’t have much but they believed in books and they believed in learning. So naturally they believed in libraries. It’s no wonder then that libraries form part of some of my strongest childhood memories.

I remember walking into libraries and being WOWed by the number of books. I felt that as a child and again and again as an adult at university, at business school, and in public libraries and bookshops. I could spend a lifetime reading and it wouldn’t be enough to read all the things I want to read. So I gave them to T-Rex. I gave her my wonder and my endless hunger and I gave her ALL the books. When she learns how to read, there’s no stopping her. Because literacy is so foundational. Unlock that and she suddenly has access to whole worlds of fact and fiction. And she loves it all, hoovering up everything from comics and classics and poetry to books on STEM, art, meditation, and thinking BIG. 

Diane Ewen’s joyful artwork brings so much fun to this journey of discovering books and the chaos that ensues when T-Rex puts her new-found skills to use as Prime Minister. One of her first acts as the big cheese is of course to make sure there are libraries EVERYWHERE. You can tell she’d be 100% behind the campaign to save libraries today and she’d obviously be very pro school libraries. I don’t know where I’d be without libraries. My parents couldn’t have afforded to buy all the books I read growing up. And it’s at my local libraries that I discovered (as T-Rex does) the amazing range of books out there - fiction and non-fiction. That discovery made me a writer and that too, one who wants to write about EVERYTHING!

There was a little something missing in that range though. T-Rex is lucky. She’s very well represented in children’s books (or her male non-glasses-wearing counterparts are anyway!). But her little human friends sadly aren’t. Diane and I didn’t see ourselves much in books growing up so making this book really inclusive meant a lot to us. Especially because it’s a funny book and a madcap dinosaur adventure - because ALL children should have a chance to have those too. And ALL children should see the children around them enjoying these kinds of adventures and not just popping up in the heavy, issues-based books or the niche day-in-the-life-of books. Things are changing, thankfully, and we wanted to be a part of that change. After all, this book started its life as my submission to Penguin Random House’s WriteNow programme for underrepresented writers.

If books are a gateway into exploring new worlds and falling in love with reading and learning, they need to be accessible to everyone. This is where libraries are such a gift. Librarians too - finding just the right books to spark a child’s imagination. Books where they can see themselves and the people around them within those pages. Because when they find those books, that moment is the beginning of a beautiful, life-long adventure and a whole world of possibility.

Thank you to Rashmi for penning this thoughtful and heartfelt love-letter to libraries.