Elle McNicoll - Like a Charm Blog

All families are a little bit different.  

One of the things I find really hard, as someone who is autistic, is when people brush it away and go, “Oh, well, everyone is a little autistic.” It’s annoying because it’s not true. It’s something I know a lot of my young readers get tired of being told. But there is one thing that I know everyone has in common.  

Everyone knows that families can sometimes be a little difficult.  

Every family looks a bit different to the next, but they will all have more things in common than not. In Like a Charm, Ramya is going through a lot of changes. She’s at a new school, in a new city, while her parents are away all of the time at their new job. She is finally getting to know her cousin, Marley, and his mum – Ramya’s Aunt Leanna. She also meets her Aunt Opal for the first time.  

While Ramya knows that she’s related to all of these people, she can’t help but feel (at least in the very beginning of the book) that they are complete strangers. Blood doesn’t suddenly make someone your very best friend. But it was important to me, when writing Like a Charm, to explore the wider meaning of the word ‘family’. 

Ramya is dyspraxic, like me! And, also like I did, she attends SEN classes at school. And like I did, Ramya really does not enjoy them. Even though the teacher is very nice, and the other kids are great, Ramya can’t help but feel like she’s being boxed in and misunderstood. She’s extremely intelligent and very ambitious, and she sees things that other people don’t.  

I think it can be really easy for us to let things like what class we are put in at school, or what marks we get on a test, determine how we feel about ourselves. Which brings me back to families. Ramya feels like she is the neurodivergent sheep in her family. That’s certainly how I felt, growing up. She feels like she gets things wrong a lot of the time. She feels like the odd one out. She may even feel, on a really bad day, like her parents are a bit embarrassed by her. 

It'sreally important to remember that, even if we sometimes feel like this, we all have gifts and special powers, just like Ramya. Things that make us who we are, that only we have. Found family is a very important thing – meaning the friends that become so close to us, they are like our family. In Like a Charm, Ramya uses her gifts to make new friends and meet new people, a lot of whom feel like outsiders, too. In helping other people, and finding her own community, she becomes less afraid of who she is and a lot of her doubts go away.  

I really enjoyed writing this story for Ramya, she was a character that meant a lot to me, because even though she can be a bit prickly, she is ultimately a big softie who just wants to have people around her who understand her. She is amazed to learn her Aunt Opal is neurodivergent, too.  

By the end of the book, when Ramya is facing down the villain, she is not alone. And that was the most important thing to me. I wanted to write a story about a neurodivergent girl who starts the story by feeling quite isolated and by herself. Then, by the end, she realises that she has loads of people who care about her. 

Your gifts will bring that to you as well. So don’t hide them. Don’t let doubts or being a bit different ever stop you from being the main character in your own adventure.  

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