On her seventh birthday, Reyah asks the Sun and the Moon to make her wish come true. Unlike most kids who wish for toys or treats, Reyah\u2019s wish is for her one-year-old brother, Neil, who has a hearing disability, to be able to \u2018hear the beautiful sounds I can hear\u2019. \u201cI don\u2019t know who is more important among you two, but whoever it is, please make my wish come true,\u201d she declares. <\/p>\n
This is the premise of Vinita Singh Shetty\u2019s debut children\u2019s book, Reyah and the Cosmic Wish (Westland Books; `199), which explores themes of hope, universal balance, kindness, and more.<\/p>\n
The book emerged from the stories Shetty would make up for her daughter Annika and retell to her group of friends, helping her gauge which ones worked best. \u201cEvery time I told her a story, if I repeated it with some variation, she would point it out. Eventually, she said, \u2018Can you please write it down so you don\u2019t keep changing things\u2019,\u201d explains Shetty with a laugh, adding, \u201cI found her friends coming back and asking for particular stories often. This was one of the stories that seemed to resonate the most.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shetty\u2019s decision to include a differently abled character was with the intention to encourage empathy in children. \u201cFor a child whose sensory perceptions are so high, to have somebody at home who doesn\u2019t have that \u2013 as a child, you don\u2019t know what it is or how it\u2019s going to get better. I didn\u2019t start off thinking about how I can make the story inclusive but about how I can bring about kindness and empathy from a child without being too preachy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On her seventh birthday, Reyah asks the Sun and the Moon to make her wish come true. Unlike…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[6342,3444,77,16,15,126084],"class_list":{"0":"post-358233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-book","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-vinita-singh-shetty"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115058572416361832","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}