Children’s story takes inspiration from real-life friendship

By Max Bowen

Bridget Hodder

“The Promise,” co-authored by Fawzia Gilani Williams and Bridget Hodder, came to life after Williams read a news account of two friends, one of whom pledged to watch over a family graveyard. Though not quite appropriate for a children’s story, it nonetheless inspired the two to craft their own viewpoint of it.

In this interview, Hodder shares how the story came to be, the significane of the interfaith friendship, and her time working with Williams.



Tell me about the true story that inspired this book.
“The Promise” is an all-ages picture book about blooming in the face of adversity and the power of friendship to endure through war, separation and the passage of time. It's loosely based on the story of two best friends in Morocco during and after WWII, which my co-author Fawzia Gilani Williams discovered in a newspaper article and eagerly shared with me. The newspaper piece particularly sparked our interest because one of the friends in the article was a Muslim, and one was a Jew—just like Fawzia and me—and interfaith friendship is one of our primary inspirations.

Fawzia wrote a first draft of “The Promise” that hewed closely to Moishe and Lahcen's original experience, including the central fact that when Jewish Moishe and his family left Morocco after the war to seek safety in Israel, Muslim Lahcen stayed behind and faithfully tended Moishe's family graveyard for 60 years.

But the graveyard motif didn't sit well with our editor's idea of what might appeal to children. So, I suggested that the meaning would still be exactly parallel if we changed the graveyard into a garden...and the whole lovely tale of growth, faith, and love flowed naturally from that one altered detail.


What’s the significance of the interfaith friendship between the two characters?
As a Sephardic Jew, I come from a cultural background on my mother's side that incorporates the centuries-old traditions of Jewish and Muslim Spain, along with the 500 years my family spent in the Muslim Ottoman Empire after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. My grandmother was born into the Ottoman Empire before the Greeks took over her homeland and turned the Jews over to the Nazis.

We Sephardim are a little-known but proud minority in Judaism, and to write about who we are, we must also celebrate the Muslim influences that helped shape our cultural identity. One of the reasons I work with Fawzia is to do just that: to show through our books that Jews and Muslims have a long history of positive interaction and mutual learning, and to sow hope and peace like flowers in young hearts.



This is your second book written with Fawzia. What is your collaboration process and how did it change with this book?
Working with Fawzia is a joy, even though we are separated by space and by time zones—she lives in the UAE most of the year, and I live in Massachusetts. Our collaborative process relies a lot on email and Zoom!

Our first co-authored book, a Kirkus-starred middle grade time travel adventure called “The Button Box,” released in 2022, and took about two years to write together with a lot of back-and-forth. Fawzia has published many picture books before, including the award-winning interfaith work “Yaffa and Fatima: Shalom, Salaam,” so she had a good vision already for how the book would look and feel. As a result, writing “The Promise” took about half the time of “The Button Box.”



I really loved the illustrations by Cinzia Battistel. How did you meet up and what was the process working with them?
We love the illustrations, too! I cried when I first saw our ideas expressed so beautifully in her art. Unless a picture book author is both a writer and an illustrator, the selection of the artist is up to the publisher. So, when the team at our publisher chose Cinzia, Fawzia and I were thrilled.

When we got the first sketches from Cinzia, they were already nearly perfect. We were able to suggest tweaks for details and cultural authenticity, which she took care of on the very next round of sketches. The whole process was a very harmonious and peaceful one—in keeping with the topic of the book!