When I was a little kid, Patricia Polacco was my hero. The women in her picture books looked like the women in my church with their babushkas and her stories were filled with the sense of family and tradition that I felt in my own church. I'm Americanized Russian Orthodox, so growing up I didn't have the close group of CCD or Jewish School friends a lot of my Catholic and Jewish classmates had. Growing up through high school, I knew maybe five or six other orthodox kids and our experiences varied from Coptic to Russian to Greek to anywhere in between.
Once I started reading YA, I didn't have another Patricia Polacco to look up to. I'm religious but I've never been religious. I was kind of the black sheep of my Sunday school class, where I've grown up with three or four fairly close orthodox friends who've known me since I was in a diaper. We're the friends that don't have to talk regularly. We're connected by something else I guess. From time to time I would get sad because it felt like my experiences didn't matter. I was different after all, but I've always felt an ache for even subtly Orthodox characters in YA. Sure, it's a bit of a side thread in The Vampire Academy novels, but I've never really been into those books. Where are the Dox kids in realistic YA or dystopian? Why are the only Dox YAs about the Romanov's or a past culture I feel very little connection to? Where are the protagonists who are frustrated with two hour church services on Sundays and tired and cranky during Lent? We need diverse books, even for the few and far between Dox kids?
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