Why Is My Skin Brown?

Sarayu is twelve years old, lives in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and has spent her whole life being the wrong shade of brown in every room. At school in the US, kids mispronounce her name and tell her to go back where she came from. When her mother gets a four-month work project in Bengaluru, Sarayu leaves her best friends Ashley and Chloe behind in the cold Pennsylvania winter and flies to India expecting to finally look like everyone else.

She doesn’t.

In Bengaluru, her cousin Viveka and her friends are glued to Snapchat and whispering about boys. Her grandmother calls her kaali under her breath. Her beloved aunt presses a haldi face pack on her every night, out of love, to lighten the tan. The pool sits empty because girls don’t swim here. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a photograph Viveka should never have sent is about to become a problem bigger than either of them can handle alone.

Why Is My Skin Brown? is a novel about what happens when a girl who doesn’t fit in at home discovers she doesn’t fit in at “home” either. It is about colorism across continents, mothers and daughters carrying the same old wounds, online safety, cousin-sisterhood, and the moment a kid figures out that belonging is not the only worthwhile thing to want.

For readers ages 10 to 13. A companion novel to Why Is My Hair Curly?

Themes

• Colorism and skin-tone bias inside South Asian families
• Transnational belonging and the third-culture kid experience
• Mother-daughter inheritance, the wounds that skip generations and the ones that don’t
• Online safety, grooming, and what real friends do for each other
• K-pop fandom as cross-cultural common ground (BTS ARMY, Stray Kids STAYs)

Publication

Publisher: Red Panda, an imprint of Westland Books
Publication: Summer 2026
Ages: 10 to 13
Format: Middle-grade fiction
Cover: Illustration by Neha Rawat; design by Saurabh Garge

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For Educators and Families

Two companion guides to help bring Why Is My Skin Brown? into your classroom or your home.

• Teacher’s Guide. Tiered discussion questions, five classroom activities, CCSS and NCF 2023 alignment for grades 5 to 8.
• Parent & Family Reading Guide. Conversation starters, three small ideas to try together, and books to read next.

Books to Read Alongside

The questions in Why Is My Skin Brown? start earlier than middle school. Ritu in the Sun by Moniza Hossain (ages 4 to 8) is the natural on-ramp: a Bengali American picture book about skin and summer that opens the conversation Sarayu picks up at twelve. The titles below are the middle-grade shelf, for readers ten and up, where Why Is My Skin Brown? lives.

• Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan. South Asian Muslim American identity, friendship pressure, and a girl finding her voice in middle school.
• Front Desk by Kelly Yang. A Chinese American girl runs her family’s motel front desk and learns that kid agency and family loyalty are not the same thing.
• Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga. A novel in verse about Jude, a Syrian girl arriving in Ohio, who has to figure out who she is in a language that doesn’t have all her words yet.
• Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar. India-set during the freedom movement, intergenerational courage, a daughter and a mother learning each other.
• The Nameless God by Savie Karnel. Two children in nineties India invent a god who listens only to them. Friendship across religious identity, the questions kids ask when grown-ups stop answering.

For the full shelf by age, from picture books to young adult, see South Asian Children’s Books, by Age.

Also by Lakshmi Iyer

Why Is My Hair Curly? · The Smudged Hyphen · A Star Keeps Its Distance · Hindsight