Kids Comics Pitchfest Showcase

EDEN 2.0

16-year-old ISHA can’t stand the messiness of feelings. Or the irrational dreams she keeps having about the forbidden tree. When she manages to plug into the tree’s network, she learns her rainforest home is inside a biosphere on a climate change-ravaged Earth. And that she and her brother are an experiment: the first biosynthetic humans, made to withstand the new climate. Now, with her empathic brother, hard-ass sister, and new human frenemy, she must risk a return to life as a lab rat—or something worse—to outsmart her scientist-father and heist her late scientist-mother’s research so she can save life on Earth. But to understand what she finds, Isha must trust her feelings and discover a new way of knowing, beyond the limits of logic.

My Why:

I think the most dangerous myths are the ones we don’t realize we’re living. Disturbed by the Eden myth’s enduring legacy of misogyny, I reimagined Eve as Isha, with power and agency, freed from her legacy of woman as temptress, victim, and root of suffering. Like Isha, as a young woman my feelings frustrated me, and I learned to stomp them down with logic. As I grew to trust my feelings, I realized how our alienation from our feeling bodies mirrors our alienation from and objectification of nature. I grew up rurally and I believe we were never “cast out of the garden.” This miraculous Earth is Eden and we are burning our home. Amidst a climate crisis, I wrote this book to inspire hope and forward values of equality, peace, and cooperation.