Her novel would thus focus on a teenager that was part of the middle-class Indian expatriate community.
She wanted to write a novel set in Riyadh and Jeddah where she was brought up but outside the gated compounds and royal palaces. It is for this reason that she writes novels featuring teens who are Zoroastrian or/and South Asian. Tanaz was inspired to write her debut novel “A Girl Like That” since growing up as a teenager she never saw herself in all the books she read. Given her disinterest, she failed all of her interviews and was finally forced to acknowledge that a career in accounting was not for her and all she wanted to do was become a professional author. The recruiters from the accounting firms that had been hiring students from her class were quick to pick up on her disinterest long before her parents did. It was only in her fourth year that she began questioning her career choices as she did not particularly love accounting. When she went to college, she wanted to do something her parents would be proud of and therefore enrolled for a commerce degree hoping to become an accountant. While some of these people had been relatively successful, it was not something she wanted to do. Bhathena has seen and known many people that have lived up to their parents’ expectations and taken up careers they did not particularly love.
Like many children of Asian descent, she had to deal with fears of failure and monumental expectations that can sometimes result in self-fulfilling prophecies. Tanaz Bhathena’s young adult novels cover several themes but one theme that was significant in the life of the author was parental expectations. Her short fiction has also been featured in a variety of publications such as “Room,” “The Hindu,” “Witness,” and “Blackbird.” Tanaz is also the author of “Hunted by the Sky,” a fantasy novel that was published in 2020. She was nominated for the White Pine Award of the Ontario Library Association for her novel “The Beauty of the Moment” published in 2019. The novel was named a Best Book of the Year by several publications including “The Times of India,” “The Globe and Mail,” and “Seventeen” among many others. She wrote her critically acclaimed debut novel “A Girl Like That” in 2018. By the time she turned thirteen, she knew that she wanted a career as a professional author. As a child, she loved reading and over time she came to love writing. She spent much of her childhood in Jedda and Riyadh until the family moved to Canada when she was a sixteen-year-old. She was born in Mumbai and when she was a year old her parents moved to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Tanaz Bhathena is a young adult author from Canada.
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