"Female demon slayers, super-hero Indian goddesses, first crushes and kisses, and living true to yourself — this is an exhilarating, uplifting joy."
Fiendishly funny (“Knowing you’re about to be attacked by demons must add a whole new layer to PMS”), and sizzling with sisterhood synchronicity and bloody battles, Radhika Sanghani’s Here to Slay is shot-through with the empowering theme of daring to live as your true unique self.
It wasn’t always that way for the novel’s likeable protagonist, though. At the start of the novel, outsider Kali — a British Indian teen in a largely white school — just wants “to fit in. That’s my 16th birthday wish. To get through the rest of the day — and ideally the rest of the year — without anybody noticing me”. The exact opposite happens when Kali’s teacher Mrs Patel leads her class in a lively rendition of “Happy birthday” and relates the story behind her namesake. To Kali’s embarrassment, the “most popular girls in the whole year know I’m named after a blood-sucking goddess”.
While life became harder for Kali after her best friend moved away (“We were allies – I stood out because I was brown, and Tanya did because she was neurodivergent”), matters get a whole lot worse when a demon appears on her bed. After Kali kills the beast, it vanishes. Right after, her first period arrives.
Taking advice from Mrs Patel, who seems to know a lot more than she’s letting on, she reaches out to a charismatic fellow Kali who tells her, “This is the way it is. The demons come after us, and we’re destined to kill them. It will only end when we’ve killed them all. Or they’ve killed us”. What’s more, “They can sniff us out when we’re menstruating”.
As an escalating demon-slaying quest unfolds, Kali’s journey to embracing her unique self — and being proud of her Indian culture — is encapsulated by a shift from regarding her namesake as “weird, ugly and unlovable”, to realising she’s “the most powerful, beautiful, inspiring goddess out there… because she doesn’t conform to any of the standards that women are held to. She’s setting her own”.
Also offering authentic rep of lesbianism, asexuality, bisexuality, neurodivergence, and the dynamics of family and friendship, Here to Slay slays it big-time. In fact, it’s a firecracker of female-fronted YA fiction.
| Primary Genre | Young Adult Fiction |
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