Mexico City–born YA author Adi Alsaid realizes that the central character of his new novel, We Didn’t Ask for This (Inkyard Press, April 7), will remind readers of a very famous environmental activist: Sweden’s 17-year-old Greta Thunberg. This story of a “lock-in” at an international school that gets hijacked by a small group of protesters features a headstrong protagonist who becomes a polarizing figure among parents, school board members, and even fellow students.

But the author says he didn’t hear about Thunberg’s story until he was midway through his second draft of the novel. “It’s amazing; I feel like I was thinking of the idea as she was living it and implementing it,” he says.

The book jumps among a sizable cast of diverse, multinational student characters who are living through the ramifications after Marisa Cuevas and a group of other students chain themselves to the school entrances to demand more sustainable environmental policies. Alsaid recently spoke with Kirkus about the book.

Was there a specific news story or event in your life that sparked the idea for the book?

I love the book Bel Canto, and I’ve been trying to think of writing my own version of that. The very initial inspiration is “I want to write a book where the kids are all stuck in one place,” the way that all the characters in Bel Canto are stuck in one place. And I want to kind of dip in, even if briefly, to the POV of secondary characters and just do this ensemble book. And then I had the idea that something like The Breakfast Club would go very well with the idea of Bel Canto.

Did you create the entire list of Marisa’s demands, all 30 of them?

I started to. I never had like an actual list of 30. The fact that it’s only 30 was actually something that happened in later drafts. It was a fabulous amount of demands. And in my mind, they were just kind of like an endless list.

For the school in the book, Central International School, you don’t really name a country or a specific location.

The physical layout and the idea of the international school is based on the international school I attended growing up in Mexico City. But the reason I didn’t set it in a specific place is because climate change is a global issue. I wanted it to feel like this could be happening everywhere. Because it is happening everywhere.

All the kids in the book, no matter where they’re from or their background, are coming from a place of wealth and privilege. Did you worry about making your characters more sympathetic or more identifiable to a wider audience?

I think kids are kids. And I think when you’re writing about kids that are privileged, I would say a way of making them sympathetic is to acknowledge it. They themselves are acknowledging that privilege. It just makes it easier for everyone to get on the same page.

In the acknowledgements, you thank your sensitivity readers. Were they important to have with so many different characters of different nationalities in the book?

Absolutely. We had a couple of sensitivity readers, both reading for specific characters that match their backgrounds and then also in general, in case they saw anything that needed to be flagged. I am a male and straight, and I’m writing a female queer Muslim character. And so I knew that I had to tread carefully there and make sure that I’m representing without damaging and without presenting any stereotypes.

Also in the acknowledgments, you use the phrase, “kids fighting for change in a way we adults fail to.” What is it that that young people have that older people don’t in terms of activism?

It’s absolutely idealism. Sometimes what I feel like as an adult is that maybe the idealism of my youth is gone. But I can look to teens to remember that I can still fight for the things I believe.

Omar L. Gallaga is a technology, culture, and entertainment writer who has written for NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.