Soundarya hates her name. She thinks it is most suitable to describe a cabaret dancer of the '60s, with the heavy eyeliner and ridiculous hairstyle. Arya is what she wants everyone to call her — in sync with her sharp-witted personality. But dark layers buried underneath the warmth of her bubbly self are eventually unveiled once she develops an alter ego, a secret online persona, towards the latter-half of The Secret Life of Debbie G (HarperCollins), a graphic novel that released yesterday.

The book written by Vibha Batra and illustrated by Kalyani Ganapathy has a strange way of weaving in the "uncomfortable" details into very comfortable settings; you have three 16-year-olds including Arya talking about Hedwig (Harry Potter's pet snowy owl) one moment, and the casting couch apropos of the #MeToo movement the very next. And Batra's reasoning for including these issues forms the very core of the 290-odd page story — that these are real issues and children's books like this one shouldn't be brushing them under the carpet. "The target audience of this title is those aged 14 and above. And I hope that teens will pick the books up themselves rather than their parents giving it to them from a moral science standpoint," the Chennai-based writer asserts.