ZIA ERASES THE WORLD

Suffering from depression, a girl erases words from a magical dictionary, hoping in the process to also erase her sadness.

Zia, a sixth grader with a gift for making up words, lived happily with her mother until Shadoom came into her life a year ago. Shadoom is Zia’s name for the “room of shadows” now filling her with “fear and hurt and sadness.” Afraid everyone will think she’s a “hopeless weirdling,” Zia stops hanging out with her best friends, hides in the girls’ bathroom at lunch, and refuses to tell her mother, who’s stressed enough working two jobs, paying bills, and caring for Zia’s grouchy Greek immigrant grandmother who has dementia. Zia wants to fix herself, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. Discovering her grandmother’s mysterious dictionary that comes with a charmed eraser, Zia experiments with erasing words and feels empowered as they vanish from the world. While removing words that trigger Shadoom, Zia erases fear and then pain with dire consequences and must find a way to undo her actions. Narrating in the first-person present tense, Zia’s honest voice adds immediacy and credibility to her chronicle of the frightening onset of her depression, her lonely efforts to conceal it, her totally misguided attempts to magically erase it, and the realization she doesn’t have to cope on her own. Definitions of words key to Zia’s story introduce each chapter, reinforcing the dictionary theme.

A moving, hopeful tale about confronting depression.