Growing up in Ghana, Ama Ofosua Lieb loved listening to stories about Anansi, the trickster spider of legend. “In Ghana, these tales live in oral tradition, passed down through storytelling,” says the author, whose debut YA fantasy novel Goldenborn is out from Scholastic on May 5. “I’d never actually read his stories in book form. When I had kids, I shared Anansi with them in the same way I’d learned about him. At bedtime, I’d play the griot [West African storyteller], spinning Anansi stories from my memory and imagination.” Finding no books about Anansi by Ghanaian writers, she told her kids she might write one someday. “My kids took that as a promise. That’s how the seed was planted.”
Goldenborn centers on Akoma Addo, a resident of San Francisco’s AfricaTown. After her father falls into a coma caused by malevolent magic, she keeps her grief at bay through her secret job investigating magical crimes. This side hustle pulls Akoma into a dangerous web with Anansi at its center. The trickster offers her a deal that forces her to decide what really matters to her.
Lieb says she grew up reading Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and later Sherlock Holmes, embedding a love of mystery and puzzle-solving into her own writing. More current sources of inspiration include fellow Stanford alumni Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) and Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing).
Lieb worked on Goldenborn over the course of six years. “At first, I struggled to find the right direction because I’d convinced myself I had to represent all of Ghana on the page,” she says. “Ghana is a country where 80 languages are spoken across 75 ethnic groups, and I was trying to draw from too many cultural expressions at once.” She had a breakthrough when she narrowed her focus to “the cultural elements I truly loved and grew up celebrating in my household.” Through this focus, she had another revelation. “I realized my story did have a unifying cultural thread shared across Ghana’s many ethnic groups: Anansi.”
Though she currently lives in San Francisco, Lieb says she wrote part of Goldenborn in Ghana, which enabled her to “reconnect with the very roots that inspired it.”
