Professional animator Hagop Kane Boughazian knows what it’s like to feel different. “I mean, my name itself is a giant neon sign that says ‘other,’ ” he notes. “So when people hear my voice, they’re surprised.” Boughazian, an Armenian American who was born in Beirut, Lebanon, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and sounds like a California native.
In his debut fantasy novel for children and tweens, Hidden Gems: Quest for the Great Diamond, Boughazian explores issues of identity, the differences that divide us, and the similarities that bring us together. The book is set in a world where people—who are made of either rocks or minerals—segregate themselves accordingly. In the village of Gemstone on the edge of the forbidden Jeweled Forest, mineral kids and rock kids attend separate schools. The plot centers on grade schooler Gem, a rock born to mineral parents who wants to know why she is so different.
Joined by fellow misfits Opal, Pyrite, and Obsidian, Gem embarks on a dangerous journey across the Tumbling River and Mercury Lake to the Stibnite Cliffs and the Diamond Canyon, seeking answers from the legendary Great Diamond, a long-lost scientist. Boughazian includes a colorful glossary of the minerals and stones that he used to build a world where “lime-green peridot rockhoppers fluttered around dew-filled garnet flowers…lapis lazuli butterflies waited patiently as the sun warmed their deep blue wings, permitting them to lift their heavy pebble bodies into the sky,” and the rock and mineral families of Gemstone believed “ that they were too different ever to get along.”
Kirkus lauds the book’s “fantastical worldbuilding” and well-integrated message “that similarities are more important than the differences that divide people.”
Growing up in Lebanon in the ’80s, Boughazian says, “The Israeli and Palestinian and Lebanese conflict was a big thing.” And with great-grandparents from the Armenian area of Turkey, he is keenly aware of the wounds left by the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Yet in the U.S., Boughazian finds, the people he might expect to be in conflict with (Turkish co-workers, Israeli roommates and neighbors) are often the people with whom he has the most in common. “It helps you see that it’s the situations you’re put in that really drive your perception of who you are and who others are,” he says. “And I must add that food is a big factor. When you’re craving the same kinds of food as the people who are your ‘old enemies,’ it’s hard to stay mad.”
Boughazian came to live permanently in the United States in 1989, at age 9. Before that, he was shuttled back and forth between the two countries, “primarily due to the war,” he says. Upheaval in his parents’ marriage was a factor, too. “My parents were going through a divorce, getting back together, and separating again,” he remarks.
Boughazian felt his outsider status keenly with his American peers when he started sixth grade. “In Lebanon we were speaking Arabic, Armenian, and French, and during the war, school would be shut down [periodically]. So when I came to the U.S., I was behind in English and reading was a challenge.” It was also in the sixth grade, however, that Boughazian realized animation was his calling. He made stop-motion films at home using paper cutouts, Legos, action figures, and a camcorder. In high school, he launched into computer animation. After earning a degree in cinema from San Francisco State University, he went on to establish himself as an expert in scientific animation.
Boughazian’s inspiration for Hidden Gems, which he began to conceptualize two years ago, was his then-7-year-old son’s rock and mineral collection. “As an animator, I love materials, textures, and lighting,” he says. “And the thing that hit me first was the beauty of the minerals and how they shine in the light. My son and I started making characters out of them. We would throw ideas back and forth: What if this is what Pyrite did? What if this is what Obsidian did? It became a thing that we would constantly talk about on the way to school and at home. My daughter, who was 4…had her ideas as well.”
His theme of identity was sparked by the fact that one rock in his son’s set “looked like it didn’t fit in with the rest,” Boughazian says. “That became Gem. And then I just started writing.” Boughazian’s son, now 9, has read every draft of the book. His favorite character, he tells his dad, is Pyrite, “because he’s a goofball, like me.” His 6-year-old sister’s favorite is Crystal, the flying dragon.
Boughazian, the executive creative director at San Francisco–based Viscira, where he and his team create animations and interactive programs for major biotech and pharmaceutical companies, wrote most of Hidden Gems on his iPad during his train commute to and from work. “That was the only time I had to write,” he says. “That, and waiting for my kids’ karate class and ballet class.”
The author intends to turn Hidden Gems into an animated feature at some point. “I attribute my writing style more to my passion for film and my study of film narratives and story structure,” he says. “That’s my perspective—I picture everything and write what I picture.” For now, he is again using his train commute to write his next two books: The Adventures of the Great Diamond, a Hidden Gems prequel in the form of a graphic novel, and Max the Meteorite Finds a New Home, a picture book for younger children about a little meteorite who lands on Earth after being separated from his family. Rejected and lonely at first, Max finds his parents and friendship in his new home.
Max, with its happy ending and “safe feeling,” Boughazian says, is for “immigrant children everywhere who have to face these kinds of challenges: the fear of being alone and lost and not accepted in their new homes.”
