Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls

Image

Rowana Miller, Adjunct Faculty, English

What is the central theme of your book?

Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls is a young adult thriller about the sordid side of wealth and the ruthlessness of girlhood.

As a scholarship student at up-and-coming Manhattan prep school Davison High, my main character Kay knows that it would be a mistake to listen to the anonymous letter in her locker instructing her to dye her hand blue. Of course, it would also be a mistake to pursue Zola Wolfe, the enigmatic redhead in her Calculus class. But by the time Kay realizes that both of these decisions have the potential to destroy much more than her chance at getting into Northwestern, she’s already told the Blue Hand Girls far too much.

What inspired you to write this book?

In my freshman year of college, I had the good fortune to be recruited for a secret society. On Halloween, I received a letter under my dorm room door with a QR code and an invitation to “scan for mystery and intrigue.” I spent the next few months interacting with my peers under a code name, solving riddles, and scurrying around campus to make mischief. Then, at the end of the semester, there was a candlelit ceremony, in which the society formally admitted about 30 of us, whittled down from an initial 300 applicants. At that point, we learned that it was not, in fact, a centuries-old institution but the pet project of four sophomores who wanted to create a “meaningful mystery.”

The secret society didn’t last, but it was great fodder for fiction. Plus, those four then-sophomores became my dearest friends. They’re very pleased that they inspired the book.

Why is this book important in your field? What does it contribute to the current body of knowledge on this topic?

As a work of fiction, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls isn’t quite part of a body of knowledge, but I do think it contributes something new. I was a teenager in the 2010s, and when I was growing up, there were very few books available that featured queer girl protagonists — particularly books that felt culturally queer without being “issue books.” In the decade since Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, teenagers’ options have exploded, but much queer fiction is still rooted in issue-based storylines about coming out or navigating homophobia. Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls is the book I wish I’d had growing up, and I hope it reaches teenagers seeking out escapist queer narrative

Tell me about a particularly special moment in writing this book.

I started writing Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls when I was a sophomore in college, in a young adult fiction course taught by the YA author Nova Ren Suma. Over the duration of that class, I wrote the first several chapters and an outline, and at the end of the semester, I asked Nova if she would advise me in an independent study to finish the first draft. She said yes. That was a meaningful moment at the time, but over the years since, it has become even clearer how much it meant for Nova to take me on as a mentee. She was on deadline for her own writing that semester. Now that I’m at a stage in my life where I’m balancing writing and teaching, I know how difficult it is to find “extra” time, and I have a new understanding of just how deeply she had to have believed in my manuscript in order to give me this gift.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your book?

Minor spoiler: at the beginning of the book, my main character Kay has a very clear (one might say “inflexible”) vision of what a successful future looks like. She knows the university she wants to attend and the career she wants to pursue. At the end of the book, Kay no longer has that rigidity around life after high school she’s much more open to different pathways. I’d like teenage readers to see this as an example of growth. So often, teens are told that they need to decide everything about their futures — and that’s incredibly stressful. I hope that readers who are prone to Type A thinking, as I was in high school, will end the book feeling a little more relaxed about exploring different possibilities for what their lives can contain.

Is there anything else you'd like to share about your book?

Although Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls was my first published book, it wasn’t the first manuscript I’d written. I wrote — and ultimately shelved — two books before that. The road to publication is often long and full of rejection, and while it’s a platitude to tell aspiring authors not to give up, I do think it’s a platitude worth emphasizing.

What other books have you published?

This was my debut! I’ll have another YA thriller out with Sourcebooks in the next few years, and I’m also working on several nonfiction proposals about writing education.

Fun facts:

When did you join Dyson?

August 2025.

What motivates you as a teacher?

I love to watch students discover new interests and strengths. It’s also a pleasure when students’ ideas change the way I view my fields of study.

What do you do in your spare time; to relax/unwind?

Pet my cats, Alice and Jabberwocky.

What are you reading right now?

For learning: Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad. For fun: Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen.