Tiya Nachnani is thirteen years old and in Grade 8. She lives in India. Be You is her first book.

Her qualification for writing it is unusual and simple: she is the reader she wrote it for. Every other guide to middle school is written by an adult looking back across twenty or thirty years. Tiya wrote hers from inside Grade 8 — while the friendships were still forming and falling apart, while the exams were still coming, while she was still working out the answers.

She has been a reader since before she could read alone. From the age of two she and her mother read together, coming home from the library every Monday with a fresh stack of twenty books; by the time she was five they had read more than a thousand between them. Wonder by R.J. Palacio is the one she has gone back to more than five times.

The book began with a question. Asked what she wanted to do one summer, she said she loved books but did not just want to do storytelling sessions. Her mother suggested a blog, or a book. She said: a book? Okay, maybe, let's see — sure. What followed was more than two hundred days of early mornings, late nights and hours after school, spent writing the chapters, correcting the spellings and gathering feedback, with several points along the way where giving up would have been easier than carrying on.

Much of what is in these pages she learned the hard way. She has been the girl not invited to the sleepover, the girl called cringe, and the girl whose mind went blank in the middle of an exam. She writes about all of it plainly, without turning herself into a hero and without pretending she has finished working it out.

Her favourite subjects at school are English and maths. The best part of her week is a Sunday morning with a book and no homework. She writes her best paragraphs when she is supposed to be doing maths.

She wrote this book because she wished someone had handed it to her in 7th grade.