{"id":30994,"date":"2025-09-19T06:18:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T06:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30994\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T06:18:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T06:18:07","slug":"ely-girl-writers-novel-is-now-in-her-own-local-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30994\/","title":{"rendered":"Ely girl writer&#8217;s novel is now in her own local library"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Hephzibah said she had always loved going to her local library, but when she was about eight years old, she became disappointed she did not see enough &#8220;books that have characters of minorities; characters of different backgrounds&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Because inside, black, Asian or ethnic minority people are not any different to anyone else and it&#8217;s just annoying that we&#8217;re not seen as equals,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Luckily, she had always loved to write, scribbling ideas in notebooks, so she had a starting point for her first book.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I decided that the [lead] should be a black girl, just to show others that anyone can be the main character, and I decided to name her Hephzibah because it&#8217;s not a very common name.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hephzibah said she had always loved going to her local library, but when she was about eight years&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-30994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}