Half-Breed has officially been on the market for 5 months. I’ve gotten a lot of amazing feedback about the worldbuilding and character development, but one thing I don’t hear about, is the themes tucked within.
Yes, I wanted to write a love story, but a love story rich with plot and real world meaning. I’m going to do a series of blogs addressing some of the different themes within Half-Breed, and why they made it into a post-apocalyptic reverse harem novel. Starting with, bullying and child suicide.
Yikes. It gets a little deep, so this is your #triggerwarning, right now.
The opening chapter of Half-Breed has Alice, a twelve-year-old girl, escaping the safety of her protected town on a mission to find a local legend, a demon. She intends to use this demon as a means to end her life. She’s been ostracized, treated as subhuman and the girls in her class have been physically violent, to the point of leaving deep cuts and breaking her fingers.
Then they killed her pet, a security animal, and the abuse continues. The demon just can’t understand why humans would allow this to happen, why they not only allow, but encourage their children to destroy lives. At the end of the chapter, he’s decided that humans are just an uncategorized type of monster.
Why would this be the opening scene of a love story? Yes, it gives the opportunity for character growth and gives the reader an instant idea of what the world Alice is living in looks like from a child’s perspective.
It’s deeper than that.
Six years ago a friend in the UK lost her son to bullying. Her Simon was a beautiful, vibrant boy, full of jokes and cuddles and laughter. Like Alice, Simon was painfully young, just fifteen. He was bullied so badly he swallowed a bottle of pills, and succumbed just days later.
My heart broke for her. I couldn’t imagine the grief, the loss. It stayed with me for years.
She is so incredibly inspirational, and continues to fight for changes in the law, to protect other children from experiencing what Simon went through.
Last spring I was at work when I received a phone call from the Boy’s and Girl’s Club. Inari had very seriously told a staff member he wanted to die. He hated his life, he loved his family but we couldn’t protect him. My ten-year-old, wanted to die.
A co-worker drove me there and I sobbed the entire way, thoughts of my friend and her Simon in my head.
My boy had come to me with problems in the fall, some kids were being awful. I reported it immediately, I’m not going to sit back and let my kid be bullied. I kept up with it, reported it a second time, and Inari stopped mentioning it. When I asked things were “fine” at school, he loved his teacher, had a couple of friends.
It hadn’t stopped. He simply stopped telling me because nothing happened. Nothing changed. He did what he was supposed to do and spoke up, and the adults in his life failed him.
I raised hell that day. His bullies were caught on camera shoving him around on the playground. The school dean admitted it was a problem. The school principle played it off like the children were just playing, and my son was over dramatizing it. They caught them. On. Camera.
In response they offered counseling for my child with thoughts of suicide, and wanted to have him sit in the office during recess, to ‘protect him’ from the other kids. They wanted to punish the victim, and not the little shits that were making his life a living hell.
I pulled him from school 3 weeks early. He came to work with me every day where he was showered with love from myself and my co-workers. The school did nothing.
They have a “zero tolerance” policy, and they did nothing. Another mom contacted me and stated that her son was in my son’s class, and he was so bullied about his size that he hadn’t eaten dinner all week. It was a Thursday night.
Not enough is done to protect these kids. Not enough is done to make the problem children face real consequences for the harm they are very deliberately causing. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in children aged 10 to 14.
It’s a real world issue, and it isn’t addressed and talked about nearly enough. So it made its way into my fluffy little romance novel, my only outlet to be heard, in the hopes that it would make someone think about it a little deeper.
Because Lord Makkai is right.
You can get your copy of Half-Breed, Taming the Elements right here.
And the second book in the series Witchling, Taming the Elements: Book 2 is available here