Author Interview: The Book of BIG Questions

Image courtesy of Maha Kamal. She holds the copyright, so ask her before using it!

Recently, I heard one of my mom’s friends was making a book. The book is called The Book of BIG Questions, and it is being illustrated and written by Maha Kamal. It is about the hard to answer questions children ask, but with animal illustrations. What the book does is get kids to talk to adults about important questions when they read the book together. It puts a question out on the table, the adult says what he or she thinks, and then asks the child what they think about it, like this:

Image courtesy of Maha Kamal. She holds the copyright, so ask her before using it!

Maha’s book reached its Kickstarter goal a couple of days ago. As she points out, a book doesn’t stop being made once the money is pulled together. She is still making pages of the book, since there is no real deadline for when the book has to be finished. Maha is still working on making the art on every page have the same style.

She is proud of the fact she has actually kept to this project for so long. As anyone who has tried to make a book would know, it is hard to stick with the same idea and roll with it. I myself have scrapped papers I worked on for hours, later feeling regret for not sticking with it. Her inspiration for sticking with it was Carl Sagan, who wrote the book Cosmos.

Maha spends about an hour and a half on each page. (Keep in mind she does the illustrations and the writing!) Maha states that her teachers from her law school and her mentor were some of her biggest supporters. Kamal says she learned a lot of fascinating things about animals while researching.

The advice Kamal has for an inspiring authors, child and adult alike, is: “Don’t even think about wanting to write a book. Pretend each page is it’s own book. Each illustration is a separate painting.”

Maha Kamal’s The Book of BIG Questions simplifies the tough questions children ask, while teaching the reader about animals and simultaneously bringing you and whoever you are reading the book with closer together. I recommend it and will be sure to let my readers know when this awesome book comes out!

This is me interviewing Maha Kamal at Denver’s Cat Cafe!

More about the Author of The Book of BIG Questions

Maha Kamal is a Pakistani-American who graduated from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 2013. She is a lawyer by trade and she works for a family law firm currently. She has a wide variety of interests from traveling to art. She lives with her two rescued cats, Frances and Mikhail. She loves International Politics and recommends Carl Sagan to any authors in need of inspiration. Her favorite art style to use is inkblot and she currently rocks a fro. Learn more at her website.